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?
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.
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
If you are using Smartling’s AI Toolkit, you can select 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.
Tip: AI-Enhanced Glossary Term Insertion is only available as part of Smartling’s AI Toolkit. To enable the AI Toolkit for your account, please reach out to your Smartling Customer Success Manager.
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 that has Glossary Term Insertion enabled, all active glossaries in the project's linguistic package are checked for terms in the source language of the Job.
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.
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 account-wide machine translation areas, 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
✅ Dynamic Translation with the ServiceNow Connector
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 account-wide MT integrations:
- Enable Glossary Term Insertion for a Machine Translation workflow
- Enable Glossary Term Insertion for one of Smartling's account-wide 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
- If you are using Smartling’s AI Translation Toolkit, you can now 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 only available as part of Smartling’s AI Toolkit. If you are not using the Toolkit, the standard insertion type is selected automatically after enabling Glossary Term Insertion. - Click Save.
Enable Glossary Term Insertion for Account-Wide MT integrations
- Go to Account Settings > Machine Translation Settings
- Click on the Settings tab, then navigate to the relevant account-wide MT integration settings page by selecting the integration tab (e.g, CAT tool, GDN, Zendesk Support Plugin)
- 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 not available for account-wide MT integrations. If Glossary Term Insertion is enabled, Standard Insertion will be used for these areas.