Interpreter's Memory

Tools for Pre-Class Preparation

Why File Format Matter for Glossaries and Transcripts

In interpreter education, glossaries and transcripts are two of the most common preparation materials. But often, they are shared in formats that actually increase the preparation burden for students.

From our observations and informal student interviews, one clear pattern emerged: faculty love PDFs.

Glossaries, transcripts, reading materials, everything ends up in PDF. Sometimes it’s even a scanned PDF.

While PDFs may feel clean and official, they’re deeply unhelpful for actual learning workflows.

Glossaries: Not the Table

Even when shared as editable documents, glossaries often come as formal tables in .docx or even in .pdf format. While this may look tidy, tables are not interoperable with how students manage terminology:

◼ Students often keep their own personal termbases in Excel, Notion, or other note-taking tools with their own structure of information.

◼ Pasting from a rigid table often creates dirty data, broken rows, or format chaos.

◼ Manual copy-paste is frustrating and time-consuming, especially if the student has to clean up merged cells or fixed column widths.

A better approach is simpler than you think:

◼ Use plain text. Share terms and equivalents as simple line-by-line entries:

e.g. Source – Target

This is actually much more interoperable, accessible, and allows the student to integrate the materials into their system easier.

Transcripts: Add Metadata, Use Double-spacing

When sharing transcripts, faculty often overlook one powerful organizing tool: metadata.

Metadata not only helps students understand the source material—it also helps faculty archive and reuse their own materials more effectively.

Basic metadata to include might be:

  • Course name and semester
  • Date of creation
  • Source:
    • speaker name
    • event name
    • context note
  • subject matter
  • Link to the source video/audio file
  • Duration
  • Transcript created by

Special Note on links as metadata:

When embedding links into transcripts, especially for source audio or video, be mindful of how they appear in both printed and digital versions.


If you simply paste a raw URL like https://some-string-of-code, it’s almost meaningless to students when printed; they can’t guess what it’s about, and it’s nearly impossible to type manually.

However, many platforms (like Google Docs or Microsoft Word) will automatically convert links into titles—for example:
“Education for Interpreters – YouTube”
This a helpful feature. It tells students what the link is about, where it leads, and what platform it’s on.

If you’re distributing both print and digital copies of your materials, keep the auto-generated title format.

  • On paper, students can identify the source at a glance.
  • On screen, they can simply click to access it.

This tiny choice makes the transcript much more navigable and self-explanatory, especially when students return to it later on or try to match printed notes with online resources.

Students overwhelmingly prefer to handwrite annotations.

If you’re printing transcripts for in-class use, consider using double spacing and wide margins.

While saving paper is important, this layout isn’t wasteful; it’s a canvas for students’ notes.

Intuitions:

Clean design isn’t always accessible design.

In the context of interpreter training, our job is not to finalize documents, but to support students’ processing and learning.

Let’s choose formats that can be edited, repurposed, annotated, and extended—formats that keep students in control of their prep environment.