While I agree on the need for terminology I think in many cases doing this first would not be productive. I’d rather see people working with a glossary that is product specific. That way their work is directly related to the task at hand.

Once the language has localised a number of products then it might make sense to align terminology for consistency. But doing it first is demotivating especially in languages with no terminology.

If you look at http://pootle.locamotion.org we’ve created domain specific terminology lists for each project. If you look carefully they are widely different.

You can also see that we host the older GNOME terminology and I’ve also worked on the old OpenOffice.org terminology list. Both of which are unmaintained, which kourge@ highlighted as a more serious problem, but also they are too big and too unrelated to the actual needs of the translation task.

So my suggestion, work from domain specific glossaries. In time try to eliminate inconsistencies and standardise. But don’t make that your first task in the belief that it will get more translation done.