How to build a translation glossary for your website

A translation glossary is a short list of the words on your site that must be translated one fixed way in each language, or left exactly as written. It usually holds your brand and product names, plan names, feature names and a handful of industry terms. You build one by collecting the terms that appear across many pages, deciding each one per language, and writing those decisions down where your translators and your translation tool both read them. Keep it small: a glossary of forty well-chosen terms does more for consistency than a list of four hundred that nobody maintains.

What a glossary is for, and what it is not#

Google's documentation for its translation API defines a glossary as "a custom dictionary the Cloud Translation API uses to consistently translate the customer's domain-specific terminology." Its examples are a good summary of why you need one. A product name such as "Google Home" should stay as it is. An ambiguous word such as "bat" needs to be pinned to one meaning. A borrowed word such as "bouillabaisse" may need a set rendering ("fish stew") instead of whatever the engine picks.

A style guide and a translation memory are often mixed up with a glossary.

A style guide covers how to write in a language: tone, grammar choices, punctuation, how to address the reader. Microsoft publishes one per language and describes them as "collections of rules that define language and style conventions for specific languages." A glossary is narrower. It lists terms and their fixed translations.

A translation memory stores whole sentences you have translated before so they can be reused. It grows by itself as you translate. A glossary is curated by hand and holds single terms. That is why a glossary needs an owner and a translation memory does not.

Step 1: collect the candidate terms#

Start from your own site, since the terms that matter are the ones your visitors see over and over. Go through these places:

• Your navigation, footer and account area. Labels like "Dashboard", "Billing" or "Sign in" repeat on every page and should read the same everywhere.
• Product, plan and feature names. These are the terms most likely to be translated by accident, especially when they are ordinary words such as "Starter", "Pro" or "Insights".
• Your company name, legal entity name and any trademarks.
• Industry terms your customers use, in the form they use them. If your audience says "SKU", do not let a translation spell it out.
• Words with two meanings on your site. "Order" can be a purchase or a sequence. "Free" can be a price or a state.

Then cut. A term earns a place when a wrong or inconsistent translation would confuse a visitor or break a promise you made in the source. If a word translates the same way everywhere without help, it does not need an entry.

Step 2: decide each term per language#

For every term and every target language you have three choices:

1. A fixed translation. "Subscription" is always "suscripción" in Spanish.
2. Keep as written. Your brand, your product names and most trademarks stay in the source language in every target language.
3. No entry for that language. The translator or the engine decides, which is right when the language has no settled term yet.

Ask a native speaker to make these decisions, ideally one who knows your market. Whether your German customers expect to see "Dashboard" in English or a German word is a question about them, and a dictionary cannot answer it.

The TAUS post-editing guidelines make the same distinction from the reviewer's side. For publishable quality they ask the reviewer to "ensure that key terminology is correctly translated and that untranslated terms belong to the client's list of 'Do Not Translate' terms." A website glossary is that list, written down before the review starts.

Step 3: settle case, plurals and overlaps#

Case. "Relay" as a product name and "relay" as a verb are different words. Google's API treats glossary matches as case sensitive by default, and lets you ignore case for all entries when you apply the glossary. Decide per term which you need.

Plurals and other forms. Most tools match whole words, so an entry for "subscription" will not match "subscriptions". If the plural appears on your site and must be fixed too, add it as its own term.

Overlaps. If you have both "Relay" and "Relay review" as terms, the longer one should win where both match. Check how your tool handles that before you rely on it.

Step 4: write it down in one shared format#

A table is enough. Here is a template with a few example rows for a fictional coffee subscription shop:

Keep the notes short and practical. Where the term appears and why the decision was made are both worth a line.

Step 5: keep it current#

A glossary goes stale when nobody owns it. Give one person the job of approving changes, and add a review to your launch checklist, so that a new plan name or feature gets its entries before the page goes live.

Decide what happens to existing pages when an entry changes. If you rename a plan, you want the old name gone from every language. If you only refine a translation, you may be happy to let it apply to new text and fix the old pages when they are next edited.

How the Glossary works in LangRelay#

LangRelay has a Glossary for each Site, on paid plans. Anyone with access to the Site can read it, and people who can configure the Site can change it.

You add a term with Add term, entering it as it's written on your site. For each of the Site's languages you then give a required translation or choose Keep as source, and you tick Match case where case matters. A term with neither a translation nor Keep as source in some language is counted as missing, and the Glossary shows how many terms still have a gap, for example "12 terms · 2 missing a translation". Terms match whole words, and where two overlap the longest wins, which covers the "Relay" and "Relay review" case above.

The page says what a change does: "Machine translation follows these terms. A change applies to later machine translation; existing translations stay as they are." Every change makes a new numbered version of the Glossary, and the Content workspace shows which one a page was translated with ("Used glossary version 4"). When you do want existing pages brought in line, select the text in the translation table and choose Machine retranslate. The new output goes through review and approval like any other translation.

Keep as source in the Glossary is guidance for future machine translation. It is separate from the Keep source text action on a single line of a page, which is one person's decision for that one line.

Other translation tools offer glossaries too. DeepL's API lets one glossary hold several dictionaries, each mapping source terms to target terms for one language pair, and Google's API supports both one-way glossaries and sets of equivalent terms across languages. Those are built for developers calling the API. LangRelay's is a page in the product, tied to the Site's own languages and its review step. The translation quality page shows the Glossary alongside the other controls, and you can book a demo to set one up for your site.

Mistakes to avoid#

• Adding every noun on the site. A long list hides the entries that matter and slows every review.
• Choosing translations without a native speaker. A term that looks right in a dictionary can sound dated or wrong to your customers.
• Forgetting the forms a term takes. Plurals, and in some tools capitalised versions at the start of a sentence, need their own entries.
• Treating the glossary as a style guide. Tone and form of address belong in language settings or a style guide. In LangRelay, formal or informal address is the Formality register setting for each language.
• Never checking what was published. A glossary steers the translation. Someone still has to read the page, as covered in post-editing website copy. The examples in is Google Translate accurate show how names and short labels trip up machine output, and machine vs human translation covers where the person who owns the list fits in.

Common questions#

What is the difference between a translation glossary and a termbase?#

In practice they cover the same ground. "Termbase" is the name used in professional translation tools for a structured glossary, often with definitions and usage notes for each term.

How many terms should a website glossary have?#

As many as you have real decisions for. Start with brand, product and plan names and the labels in your navigation, then add terms when a review finds an inconsistency.

Do glossaries work with ChatGPT?#

You can paste your glossary into each prompt and ask the model to follow it. Nothing carries it from one chat to the next, so you have to include it every time. Our article on ChatGPT for website translation covers the other gaps.