Glossary and do-not-translate list

BuiltLast updated 2026-10-28

On this page

Edit the glossary
How it is used
Matching rules
Known limits of the form
Existing translations

The glossary has two kinds of entries.

Do not translate: the term stays exactly as you wrote it. Use it for brand names, product names and technical words.
Preferred translation: you choose how a term is translated into a language. Use it for words your industry has a standard translation for.

Edit the glossary#

Open Editor, choose your site, then open Glossary. Each row is one term. Add the term, say whether it is left alone, and enter the preferred text for each language. Save the page.

Editors, admins and owners can change the glossary. Viewers can only read it.

The form refuses empty terms, duplicate terms, very long terms, unknown languages, and a preferred entry with no text.

How it is used#

During machine translation. Do-not-translate terms are protected so that the engine does not change them. Preferred translations are passed to engines that support a glossary of their own.
In quality checks. If a do-not-translate term is missing from a translation, the string gets the flag glossary-violation. If the preferred text is missing, it gets glossary-preferred-missing. See Quality flags.

Glossary mismatches in the editor are warnings. They do not stop you from saving.

Matching rules#

Matching ignores capital letters by default.
For most languages a term matches whole words only. For Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Thai and similar scripts it matches inside text, because those languages do not put spaces between words. A short term can then match inside a longer word.
An entry for fr also applies to fr-CA. An entry for pt-PT does not apply to pt-BR.

Known limits of the form#

The editor form does not keep two settings. It always saves terms as not case-sensitive. A do-not-translate term limited to one language is saved for all languages. If you need either, use the API: GET and PUT on the site's glossary.

Existing translations#

A new glossary entry does not rewrite translations you already have. Re-translate the rows you want to change. See Bulk actions. Manual and reviewed translations are never replaced by a re-run.