Creating a glossary of terms that have custom translations

The Translation Glossary allows you to define your own translations for individual terms or prevent terms from being translated at all, such as company, product, or process names, and keep them consistent across all your multi-language content.

If you're using Auto-Translate, you may have certain words you'd prefer it not to translate or other words for which you have a specific translation that may not be offered. In these cases, you can add these words to the Translation Glossary. Instead of applying its own translation for a term, Auto-Translate will use your glossary term in its place.

You can choose to apply the glossary translation to all languages or select a language if you need to be more specific. Auto-Translate will look at the language of the course being translated and the language of the resulting translations to determine whether a glossary term is used.

There is no limit to the number of terms you can add to your glossary and the Translation Glossary supports all languages that can be translated using Auto-Translate. You can see a full list of languages supported by Auto-Translate in Feature Focus: Auto-Translate.

Note: Adding a term to the glossary will not replace the word retroactively in existing Projects. A Project needs to be auto-translated for any terms in the glossary to be replaced in that Project. For more information about how to automatically translate your Projects, see Using Auto-Translate to create language Variations of a Parent Course.

 

Creating a glossary term

1. Go to the Team section of the platform

2. Select Glossary

Author, highlighted Glossary in toolbar.png

3. You'll be taken to the Translation glossary interface:

Translation Glossary, no terms added.png

4. Select Create Glossary Term

A pop-up window will open. There are two sections under which you can configure your terms:

  • Term to translate where you can add your glossary term and select its language
  • Translations where you can add your replacement terms and their languages

Translation Glossary, term management modal .png

 

Adding a term for all languages

If you don't need to specify a language for your glossary term or its translation, selecting Any from the Language drop-down menu will mean that the term will be identified and replaced with the glossary translation in all instances regardless of the language it appears in. 

1. Under Term to translate, select Any for the language of the term:

Translation Glossary, arrow pointing to Term to translate language modal, set to All.png

2. Type the word in the Term field

3. Under Translations, select Any from the Language drop-down menu

4. Add the replacement term in the Translations text field

This is the simplest way of adding terms to your glossary and you can use this for more universal terms that don't need a different translation for each language. 

Tip: If you want a term to be ignored by Auto-Translate, you can add the same term to both fields to ensure that it stays the same in all languages. This is useful for things like brand or product names that don't need to be translated.

 

Using the language selectors to refine when your glossary translations are used

If you have more specific preferences about when a glossary translation is used, you can use the Language drop-down menus to choose a language. This can be useful if you need to distinguish a word in one language from other languages where it is spelled the same, or if you'd like to apply multiple translations to a single term.

You can select a language for both the Term to translate and the Translation or use one of them in combination with the Any option to refine when Auto-Translate uses the glossary translation.

Setting a specific language for a Term to translate

Selecting a language for a term means that its glossary translation will only be used for courses translated from that chosen language.

For example, selecting English for a term will mean that the term will only be replaced with the glossary translation if the course being translated is in English: If a course is translated from French, Auto-Translate will not use the glossary translation and translate the term itself instead. 

Setting a specific language for a Translation

Setting the language for a translation will mean that the term will only be replaced in courses translated into the selected language(s). You can add as many translations for a term as you like.

For example, if you add three translations for a single term in German, Spanish, and French the term will only be replaced in courses that have been translated into these languages. All other languages will be translated as normal.

 

Uploading a glossary file

If you have one, you can import a glossary file by selecting Import. This allows you to add multiple terms in bulk and can act as a backup for your glossary if you need to restore it.

For more information about creating and managing a glossary file, see Understanding how to use and edit a Translation Glossary file.

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