Previously, an MT-Optimized Glossary was required to use Glossary Term Insertion in Machine Translations. As of November 2024, you no longer need to create an MT-Optimized Glossary. Smartling will now automatically label glossary entries that are MT-compatible in each of your active glossaries. These MT-Compatible entries can then be automatically inserted into your machine translations.
What is an MT-compatible glossary entry?
An MT-compatible glossary entry is a glossary entry that can be used for Glossary Term Insertion in MT.
Unlike human linguists, machine translation engines cannot distinguish which glossary terms should be used in specific contexts. Additionally, plurals, verbs, and adjectives can be highly inflected in many languages, making it challenging for MT engines to correctly inflect such terms. Therefore, Glossary Term Insertion relies on glossary entries that are marked as MT-compatible. Any glossary entry that is deemed suitable for MT will be labeled as MT-compatible, indicating that it is acceptable for accurate recognition and use by MT. This labeling process excludes entries that could confuse MT such as duplicates, inconsistencies, sentences, special characters, and other elements that could increase the risk of poor quality translations.
Entries that are marked as DNT (Do Not Translate) and translated entries can both be evaluated for MT compatibility.
How are glossary entries labeled MT-compatible?
Smartling automatically checks each active glossary in your account. Archived glossaries are not included in the MT compatibility check. Entries found suitable for machine translation are given the label "MT-compatible" and can be automatically inserted in machine translations. The label is applied on the entry-level, not on a term-level. If a glossary entry is labeled MT-compatible, all terms in that entry can be used for Glossary Term Insertion. If a change or update is made to a glossary, its entries are automatically re-checked.
Note: The automatic re-check process is triggered whenever a glossary term or its translation is updated. This process is asynchronous, so the MT-compatible label will not be added immediately, but will appear once the re-check process is complete, which can take up to a few hours.
By default, the optimization criteria is set to "Most liberal", meaning the labeling is more inclusive and will include plurals and glossary entries in all parts of speech, allowing more of your brand/preferred glossary terms to be used in machine translations. You can change the optimization criteria to "Strict" if you prefer a less inclusive approach to labeling, which reduces the number of entries available for MT, but also reduces the risk for suboptimal translations.
For more information about why certain entries were deemed unsuitable for MT, please contact your Smartling Customer Success Manager.
How to Adjust MT-compatibility Criteria
To adjust the level of compatibility strictness, follow these steps:
- Go to Account Settings > Linguistic Assets > Glossaries
- Click MT Compatibility Settings
- Select one of the four options listed
- Click Save
If you make a change to the MT Compatibility Settings, it will trigger an immediate re-optimization and glossary entries will be re-checked based on the new level of strictness specified.
View MT Compatibility Check Details
You can see how many glossaries entries were found unsuitable for machine translation by checking the MT Compatibility results for a particular glossary, to do so:
- Go to Account Settings > Linguistic Assets > Glossaries
- Click the ellipsis menu next to a particular glossary
- Select View MT Compatibility Check Details