The Glossary Term Insertion Settings allow you to associate a glossary with your MT Profiles. When the associated MT Profile is used to translate your content, your glossary terms will automatically be inserted in the machine translations. This helps you receive even better machine translations that are on-brand and in line with your preferred terminology.
Example
For 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?
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 Profile 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 Profile 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.
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.
How it works
Glossary term insertion can be set up for any MT profile*, including Smartling Auto Select. When a Job is authorized into a workflow that is assigned to an MT Profile with an integrated glossary, the MT Profile checks the glossary for terms in the source language of the Job.
Smartling’s standard Glossary Term Insertion scans the source text for terms and term variations that are included in the associated glossary.
The terms are inserted into the translated string. That translated string is then re-translated to ensure it is used in the most accurate form for that sentence.
However, highly inflected locales may require additional post-editing to ensure the grammatical correctness of all inserted glossary terms.
*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.
Where does Glossary Term Insertion work?
Once the Glossary Term Insertion settings have been fully set up, your glossary will be considered for all machine translation workflows where the associated MT Profile is used.
Glossary terms are also inserted if the associated MT profile is used for any one of Smartling’s account-wide machine translation options, including:
✅ Smartling Translate
✅ MT suggestions or auto-populate options in the CAT Tool
✅ Zendesk Support Plugin
✅ Site-wide machine translation for the GDN
✅ Smartling’s Machine Translation API
Optimize the Glossary before setting up Glossary Term Insertion
Unlike human linguists, machine translation engines cannot distinguish which glossary terms should be used in a particular context only.
Therefore, we would recommend optimizing your glossary for machine translation before integrating it with an MT Profile. There are a number of ways to optimize the glossary, including:
- Your glossary should be up-to-date and free of any duplicate terms or plural forms.
- It should not include any verbs, since they cannot always be conjugated correctly when used in machine translation. Similarly, conjunctions, articles or adverbs should be avoided.
- Your glossary should not include any slogans, longer phrases or even full sentences. Glossary terms including four words or more, or containing HTML tags, should be avoided.
- For best results, the glossary should include only nouns and noun phrases.
- Adjectives that are not part of a noun phrase should be removed.
Each MT Profile can use only one glossary. If you are currently using multiple different glossaries across your various projects in Smartling and would like all of them to be taken into consideration for machine translations, we would recommend combining them into a single account-wide glossary.
Requesting an MT-optimized glossary
Smartling can automate the process of enhancing your glossary for machine translation. During that clean-up, any glossary terms that do not meet the above requirements, as well as any duplicate terms, will be removed.
To get your glossary optimized for machine translation by Smartling, reach out to your Customer Success Manager and specify which glossaries you would like to include. All selected glossaries will then be combined into a single, account-wide glossary for use in MT.
For insertion in machine translations, the glossary does not need to be added to any Linguistic Package. If, however, you would like to use the same glossary as well for workflows using human translation, it needs to be added to the relevant Linguistic Package(s).
Once a glossary has been optimized for machine translation by Smartling, it remains locked and cannot be edited, to ensure that it remains compatible with our Glossary Term Insertion settings.
Tip: For more information on how to optimize your glossary for machine translation, read our documentation on Optimizing Your Glossary for Machine Translation.
How to configure Glossary Term Insertion Settings
- Go to Account Settings > Machine Translation Settings
- Navigate to the Profiles tab.
- Click the ellipses on the MT Profile you wish to integrate a glossary with and select the option "Edit Glossary Term Insertion Settings".
- To enable Glossary Term Insertion on the MT Profile, click the toggle on and select the optimized glossary to associate with the MT Profile.
- Click Save.