Glossary Rules

Glossary rules let you control how specific terms are handled during translation. You can keep terms untranslated (brand names, technical terms) or force specific translations for consistency.

Rule Types

Keep

Prevents a term from being translated. The original term appears as-is in the translated page.

Use for: Brand names, product names, technical terms, acronyms, code snippets.

Example: Keep “Universally” — the word “Universally” will never be translated, regardless of the target language.

Translate

Forces a specific translation for a term instead of letting the AI choose.

Use for: Terms where the AI consistently picks the wrong translation, industry jargon with a preferred translation, terms with multiple valid translations where you want consistency.

Example: Translate “Dashboard” as “Tableau de bord” in French — every time “Dashboard” appears, it will be translated as “Tableau de bord” instead of whatever the AI would normally choose.

How Rules Are Applied

Glossary rules are checked on every translation request, before the AI translator processes the content. Here’s what happens:

Exact Matches (handled before AI)

When a string extracted from your page exactly matches a glossary term, it is handled directly — the AI translator never sees it.

• Keep rule: The original string is used as the translation (no change).
• Translate rule: Your specified translation is used directly.

This is the fastest path — no AI processing, no word count usage.

Substring Matches (guided AI)

When a glossary term appears inside a longer string (e.g., your term is “Dashboard” and the string is “Welcome to the Dashboard page”), the AI translator still processes the string, but receives instructions to respect the glossary rule.

• Keep rule: The AI is told to never translate that term within the string.
• Translate rule: The AI is told to use your specified translation for that term within the string.

The AI follows these instructions in most cases, but since it’s processing the full sentence, results may occasionally vary for complex strings.

Language Targeting

Each rule can target:

• Any language — The rule applies to all target languages on your site.
• A specific language — The rule only applies when translating to that language.

To have different translations for different languages (e.g., “Dashboard” as “Tableau de bord” in French but “Panel” in Spanish), create separate rules for each language.

A language-specific rule takes priority over an “any language” rule for the same term.

Case Sensitivity

Rules can be case sensitive or case insensitive:

• Case sensitive (default): “Dashboard” matches only “Dashboard”, not “dashboard” or “DASHBOARD”.
• Case insensitive: “Dashboard” matches “Dashboard”, “dashboard”, “DASHBOARD”, and any other casing.

What Happens to Existing Translations

Glossary rules are applied at translation time — they do not retroactively update translations that were already created and stored.

When you add a rule

• The rule takes effect immediately on every new translation request.
• Exact matches (the extracted string is identical to the glossary term): The glossary rule is applied directly, bypassing cached and stored translations entirely. It always takes priority. Any previously stored translation for that exact term is automatically deleted, and your site’s word count is adjusted accordingly.
• Substring matches (the glossary term appears inside a longer string): The longer string still goes through cache and DB lookups. If a stored translation already exists for that string, it will be served as-is. The glossary instruction only applies when the string needs a fresh AI translation.

When you edit a rule

• The updated rule takes effect immediately on the next translation request.
• Same as above — glossary rules always take priority over stored translations.

When you delete a rule

• The term goes back to normal AI translation.
• Since the stored translation for that exact term was deleted when the rule was created, the AI will produce a fresh translation on the next request.
• Edge cache may still serve the glossary-enforced translation briefly until it expires (typically within minutes).
• Substring matches are not affected — stored translations for longer strings that contained the term remain unchanged.

Limits

• Each site can have up to 500 glossary rules.
• Source terms can be up to 200 characters long.
• Each rule applies to one language (or all languages). For different translations per language, create separate rules.

Best Practices

1. Start with brand names. These are the most common terms that should never be translated.
2. Use “Keep” for proper nouns. Company names, product names, people’s names.
3. Use “Translate” for consistency. When the AI translates a term differently across pages, pin it down with a glossary rule.
4. Be specific with case sensitivity. If your term appears in multiple casings (e.g., “API” and “api”), use case insensitive matching.
5. Test after adding rules. Visit a translated page to verify the rule is working as expected.
6. One term, one translation. If you need different translations for different languages, create a separate rule for each language rather than using “any language”.