The Glossary Is an Admission of Defeat

A publisher once sent me a proposed six page glossary for the English edition of a novel I had translated, thirty one terms, from food to prayer times to a slang word for a kind of minibus, and asked me to approve it before the book went to print.

I read all thirty one entries and then went back through my own translation and found that twenty six of the terms were already explained, in the text itself, by what the sentence around them did. The glossary was not adding information a careful reader lacked. It was duplicating information the prose had already delivered, in flatter language, in an appendix almost nobody reads before finishing the book and few consult while reading it, since flipping to the back of a novel mid scene breaks exactly the immersion the scene was trying to build.

What a glossary actually admits

A glossary entry is not evidence that a term is foreign. It is evidence that somewhere on the page where the term first appears, the sentence failed to do the one job a sentence introducing an unfamiliar word has: make its function legible through context, so a reader who has never heard the word can still follow what it does in the scene without leaving the page. Every glossary entry is a small, itemised confession that a specific sentence, on a specific page, did not manage that, and rather than fix the sentence, someone decided to fix the reader's access to a definition instead. That is a defeat, not a courtesy. It treats the symptom, an unfamiliar word, while leaving the actual failure, an underwritten sentence, uncorrected in the body of the book.

The zero-glossary draft

Since that proposal, I run every manuscript I translate or write through what I call a zero glossary draft before I allow anyone to suggest an appendix. I remove any glossary that exists or was proposed, and I give the plain manuscript to a reader who has none of the relevant cultural background, with one instruction: mark every place where you had to stop and guess. Then I go through each marked spot and repair the sentence itself, through action, through a comparison the reader already has access to, through a second character's visible reaction, rather than restoring the glossary entry that would have covered for it. For the minibus slang word, the fix was a single added clause, the vehicle packed six to a bench meant for four, which tells a reader everything the glossary entry would have and does it while the scene is still moving, not after it has stopped to explain.

Out of the original thirty one terms, twenty eight survived this process with no definition anywhere in the book and no reader complaint in the years since. Three did not: a specific administrative term tied to French colonial bureaucracy that carried a historical weight no scene could dramatise in a single page without derailing the plot to do it. Those three earned their glossary entries honestly, by surviving an attempt to make them unnecessary. That is the only test I trust for whether an explanation belongs in a book, not whether the term is unfamiliar, which almost every term is to somebody, but whether a real attempt to write around it, in the scene itself, failed.

The obvious objection

You could argue that this puts an unreasonable burden on readers who simply want the information and would rather look it up in thirty seconds than sit with an approximate, inferred understanding built entirely from context, which risks being wrong in ways an explicit definition never would be. There is something to that. A reader inferring meaning from context can, in principle, infer the wrong thing, close enough to follow the plot but wrong in a way that would embarrass them at a dinner party, whereas a glossary entry is at least accurate, even if it sits inert on the page.

But the choice is not really between an accurately informed reader and a vaguely informed one. It is between a reader who is inside the scene, forming an impression the way they would meeting the word for the first time in conversation, guessing and revising as the scene continues to supply evidence, and a reader who has stepped outside the scene to consult an appendix, then stepped back in having gained precision and lost momentum. Fiction has never asked for the first kind of precision from any of its details. Nobody demands a glossary entry for what a character's grief actually consists of, chemically, and accepts an inferred, approximate, context built understanding instead. I am only asking that unfamiliar nouns be held to the same standard as everything else a novel asks a reader to understand without a footnote.

What survived the six pages

The published book carries three footnotes, not six pages. They are folded into the text as a translator's note at the very front, half a page, admitting plainly that a handful of terms could not be dramatised without cost to the scene. That admission felt, and still feels, more honest than a glossary pretending the other twenty eight terms needed the same treatment, when the truth was simply that nobody had gone back to see whether the sentences already did the job.