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G l o s s a r y (from Greek glōssa, glōtta – „tongue, language“) – explanation of unknown words, a dictionary (Dictionary of Foreign Words, Bratoljub Klaić)

You must have at least once in your lifetime read a book you were genuinely thrilled with…or perhaps it was another kind of reading, the sentences of which made you pause and gasp, without actually having wondered at all who was the mediator between you and the text which would have remained completely unconceivable to you forever due to a simple fact that you did not understand the language of the original text. Do you ever notice the name of the translator, language editor or proof-reader, which are usually very discreetly written in the margins as an irrelevant and minor piece of information, whereby the margin is both real and symbolic? Are you aware of how educated a court interpreter has to be in order to be capable of faithfully and consistently transferring legal terms from the original language into the target one, which in most often cases happen to be incompatible? There they are – standing in the communication channel between you and your wish to communicate and understand the unconceivable   symbols coming from the other side – court interpreters, translators, linguists, assuming in most cases a role of anonymous mediators and interpreters, hidden behind the presented meaning of the words converted into a language understandable to you.

Linguistics – …is nowadays considered a science which not only takes note of the linguistic phenomena but also explains and interprets development of language from its previous to current state; it studies not only an individual language or an individual group of languages, but rather language in general; (Dictionary of Foreign Words, Bratoljub Klaić)