With Smartling's Glossary Term Insertion feature, your translated terms from your MT-compatible glossary entries can be automatically inserted into your machine translations. This helps you receive even better machine translations that are on-brand and consistent with your preferred terminology.
Example
If your preferred French translation for the glossary term "privacy policy" is "politique de confidentialité", this specific translation will be used and inserted automatically when content containing the term "privacy policy" is machine translated.
Which glossary terms will be inserted?
By default, all active glossaries associated with the project’s Linguistic Package for a Job are used for Glossary Term Insertion. If you prefer Glossary Term Insertion only references specific glossaries, you can select which glossaries to reference.
Smartling's Glossary Term Insertion works with glossary entries that are marked as MT-compatible. This helps decrease the risk of poor quality translations from non-compatible glossary entries that might confuse MT providers. If a glossary entry is labeled MT-compatible, all terms in the entry can be used for Glossary Term Insertion. For more info, see MT-Compatible Glossary Entries.
Smartling’s Glossary Term Insertion considers:
-
All glossary terms that are marked as “DNT” (“Do Not Translate”) for the source locale:
In this case, the MT engine respects the DNT flag and inserts untranslated source term in the translation. -
All glossary terms that have a translation available for the relevant target locale:
In this case, the MT engine uses the translated glossary term as the translation. Term variations are not inserted in the translation. It is important to understand how this works with term variations.
Note: Only terms for the exact source and target locale used for machine or LLM translation are considered. Glossary terms from a Fallback Language are also inserted when using AI-Enhanced Glossary Term Insertion.
Term variations
Each term card in a glossary entry should contain only one translation in the term field. Do not include multiple translations using separators such as slashes, commas, semicolons, or vertical lines (e.g., "account/profile/record" or "dinheiro, numerário"). Doing so will result in Glossary Term Insertion reading the entire field as one term and inserting it as such. See here for more on glossary terms.
If a term can be translated in multiple ways, each alternative translation should be added as a term variation. Learn more about term variations here.
How Glossary Term Insertion handles term variations
- Source: If a term or term variations are present in the source text, the suggested glossary translation is inserted.
- Target: Only the term in the target language is inserted in machine translations. Translated term variations are not used.
Inflections
A glossary should contain terms in its most neutral form. For example, a noun is usually added to the glossary in the singular form only.
However, in your source text, glossary terms are used as part of an entire sentence structure, using various grammatical genders, plurals and cases. To ensure the grammatical correctness of your machine translations, Smartling’s Glossary Term Insertion feature adapts the inflection of your glossary terms to the sentence structure which they are inserted into.
Insertion types
You can choose between two insertion types: Standard or AI-Enhanced.
By using a Large Language Model to correct the grammatical structure of any inserted glossary terms, the AI-Enhanced insertion option produces more reliable results and improves the probability of a grammatically correct translation output. Not only is the inserted term (which is typically a noun or noun phrase) inflected properly, for example to account for plurals and/or case endings, but any accompanying articles or adjectives are also adjusted accordingly.
Note: AI-Enhanced Glossary Term Insertion is only available within workflows and Smartling Translate. AI-Enhanced Glossary Term Insertion is not supported in other MT integrations. For these integrations, standard Glossary Term Insertion can be used instead.
Tip: AI-Enhanced Glossary Term Insertion is the recommended insertion type and is available as part of Smartling's AI Hub.
Standard Glossary Term Insertion is not recommended for the following use cases:
- If you would like to insert glossary terms into translations adapted with Prompsit, please opt for AI-Enhanced Glossary Term Insertion. Standard Glossary Term Insertion is not compatible with Prompsit.
- Standard Glossary Term Insertion should not be selected for workflows using a trained MT engine or model, as this may produce unfavorable results. Instead, AI-Enhanced Glossary Term Insertion can be combined with trained models and MT engines.
- If you are using an LLM as your translation provider, only AI-Enhanced Glossary Term Insertion is supported.
Best practices for term insertion
To get the most effective results from AI-Enhanced Glossary Term Insertion (AI GTI), it’s important to set up your glossary with AI optimization in mind. The way you structure and format your glossary entries directly affects how accurately AI can insert terms into your machine translations.
Add terms in their dictionary form
Glossary terms should always be entered in their dictionary, or base, form. This means avoiding plurals, inflections, or unnecessary capitalization. Terms should only be capitalized when they are always capitalized, such as brand names or proper nouns.
Focus on nouns
Glossary terms should primarily be nouns. In some cases, verbs or adjectives may also require specific translations, but adverbs and pronouns should generally be avoided. These rarely require specialized translation and can cause issues with Glossary Term Insertion.
Capitalization
Glossary terms should always be added in their dictionary form, meaning terms and translations should not be capitalized unless they are always capitalized (for example, proper nouns). AI GTI will insert terms using the same capitalization as they appear in the glossary.
If a term requires capitalization in specific contexts (such as UI elements), mark it as case-sensitive and exact match. This ensures the term is only matched when the source term is also capitalized.
Polysemous words
Words that can function as both nouns and verbs (which is common in English) can be challenging for AI to interpret correctly. AI will try to insert these terms even when the context does not match their intended meaning.
To avoid incorrect insertions, the glossary should primarily include nouns, as verbs typically do not require specific translations. Whenever possible, avoid adding verbs to the glossary, especially when they share the same surface form as a noun.
Examples include terms like sign in, email, and shows, which can function as both actions and nouns.
How it works
Glossary Term Insertion can be enabled for any machine translation* workflow, including workflows that use Smartling Auto Select. When a Job is authorized into a workflow with Glossary Term Insertion enabled, all active glossaries in the project’s Linguistic Package or the specified glossaries (depending on setting) are checked for terms in the Job’s source language.
Smartling’s standard Glossary Term Insertion scans the source text for terms and term variations from MT-compatible glossary entries in the glossaries leveraged by the project.
The terms are then inserted into the translated string. If you are using Smartling’s standard insertion method, the translated strings are then re-translated to ensure that glossary terms are used in the most accurate form for a particular string. If you are using AI-Enhanced Glossary Term Insertion, a Large Language Model is used to correct the grammatical structure of any inserted glossary terms.
However, highly inflected locales may require additional post-editing to ensure the grammatical correctness of all inserted glossary terms.
If a glossary term is not marked as case sensitive and the term appears in the source text with varying capitalization, Glossary Term Insertion will insert the translated term as is. It will not adjust the capitalization to match that of the source. If you want the capitalization of your translations to match the source, consider adding separate glossary entries for different capitalization patterns and marking the terms as case sensitive.
*Your custom MT engines may already provide a glossary in its training data. Glossary Term Insertion and a custom MT glossary may conflict and lead to unexpected results. To ensure desired results, we advise testing translations with Glossary Term Insertion in a custom MT engine before proceeding.
Info: Please note that any blocklists associated with your glossary are not taken into consideration for Glossary Term Insertion.
Depending on the languages, MT engine or LLM provider used, and the terms involved, Glossary Term Insertion may not always perform as expected. In some cases, the specified term may not be correctly inserted into the translation.
Where does Glossary Term Insertion work?
Once Glossary Term Insertion has been fully set up, your glossaries will be considered for all machine translation workflows where Glossary Term Insertion is enabled.
Glossary Term Insertion can also be enabled for any of Smartling’s instant MT integrations, including:
✅ Smartling Translate (AI-enhanced glossary term insertion available)
✅ MT suggestions or auto-populate options in the CAT Tool (Standard glossary term insertion only)
✅ Zendesk Support Plugin (Standard glossary term insertion only)
✅ Site-wide machine translation for the GDN (Standard glossary term insertion only)
✅ Smartling’s Machine Translation API (Standard glossary term insertion only)
✅ Dynamic Translation with the ServiceNow Connector (Standard glossary term insertion only)
✅ Salesforce Service Cloud Connector (Standard glossary term insertion only)
How to configure Glossary Term Insertion
The process for enabling Glossary Term Insertion depends on whether you are using MT in a translation workflow or in one of Smartling's instant MT integrations:
- Enable Glossary Term Insertion for a Machine Translation workflow
- Enable Glossary Term Insertion for one of Smartling's instant MT integrations
Enable Glossary Term Insertion for a Machine Translation workflow
- Navigate to the project's Workflow Configuration
- Find the MT workflow where you would like to enable Glossary Term Insertion
- Click on the translation step > Manage Step
- Toggle the Enable glossary term insertion switch ON
- Then select the desired insertion type: Standard or AI-Enhanced. The difference between the two insertion types lies in the way the inflection of inserted glossary terms is adjusted to the surrounding sentence structure.
AI-Enhanced Glossary Term Insertion is the recommended insertion type. - Under Select glossaries, choose one of the following options:
‣ Use all glossaries in a Linguistic Package (default) - If you select this option, all glossaries within the project's linguistic package will be used for Glossary Term Insertion.
‣ Select glossaries - This option allows you to specify which glossaries will be used for Glossary Term Insertion. - Click Save.
Enable Glossary Term Insertion for Instant MT integrations
- From the top navigation bar, click into the AI Hub.
- Click into the Instant MT tab.
- Then navigate to the relevant instant MT integration settings page by selecting the integration tab (e.g., CAT Tool, GDN, Zendesk Support Plugin)
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Under Glossary Term Insertion for Machine Translation select one or more glossaries to use for Glossary Term Insertion
Note: AI-Enhanced Glossary Term Insertion is available for Smartling Translate, but it is not available for any other instant MT integrations. If Glossary Term Insertion is enabled, Standard Insertion will be used for these areas.