Glossary
Since 1.10.0 The glossary is your list of terms a translation engine must not get creative with — brand names, product names, and technical vocabulary. Manage it on Gloty → Glossary.
What a glossary term does
Each term has one of two behaviours:
How matching works
The glossary matches whole strings, not words inside sentences. A rule applies when a captured string is exactly the term — a product title, a menu label, a button, a heading, a breadcrumb, a meta title. It does not rewrite the term where it appears inside a longer paragraph.
That covers the cases where a mangled brand name is most visible and most damaging: catalogue listings, navigation, page titles, and search snippets. For prose, review the affected paragraphs on Gloty → Translations and correct them by hand — those edits are then protected.
Two more details:
- Matching is case-insensitive by default. Turn on Case-sensitive match if only the exact capitalisation should count. Leave it off for most brands.
- Whitespace is normalised before matching. Surrounding spaces are trimmed and any run of spaces, tabs, or line breaks inside the string counts as a single space — so a term still matches when a theme pads or wraps it.
Applied at render time
Two consequences follow from this, both useful:
- Fixes are instant and retroactive. Adding a term corrects strings that were already translated badly — no re-translation, no waiting for a queue.
- Protected terms cost nothing. A string that matches a glossary term is never sent to the translation service, so it does not consume characters from your quota.
Glossary rules apply everywhere Gloty serves translations: page content, titles, interface strings, and SEO tags.
Adding a term
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Open the glossary
Go to Gloty → Glossary and click Add term.
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Enter the term exactly as it appears
Type it the way it is written on your site, including accents and punctuation —
Chanel N°5, notChanel No 5. -
Choose the behaviour
Never translate for verbatim, or Translate as… to fill in a value per target language. Blank languages stay verbatim.
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Set case sensitivity and a note
The optional note is for your team — why this rule exists, who approved the wording.
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Save
The rule takes effect on the next page render. Each term can be switched Active or inactive without deleting it.
One rule per term. Terms are unique after case folding and whitespace normalisation, so Acme and ACME are the same rule. Edit the existing entry rather than adding a variant.
Promoting a translation you are looking at
Most glossary rules start as something you notice on Gloty → Translations: a product name that has been translated when it should not have been, or translated one way on one page and another way elsewhere. Open the row's actions menu — the ⋮ button at the end of the row — and choose Add to glossary to turn it into a rule without retyping anything.
The rule Gloty writes depends on what the row says:
Promote the same term again from another language and the value is added to the rule you already have, rather than refused as a duplicate. On a site with several languages that is the normal way to build a rule up: find the term in each language, click the button, and the one rule collects them.
It never overwrites what you have already set. If the glossary already holds a different value for that term and language, Gloty tells you what it is and changes nothing — a button in a table is the wrong place to lose wording you chose deliberately. Open Gloty → Glossary and edit the term when that happens.
The menu item is unavailable on rows that cannot become a term: ones with no translation yet, ones whose source is structured block content with no readable text of its own, and ones longer than 191 characters. Which of those applies is written under the item, so you can see it without guessing. Glossary matching is whole-segment, so a paragraph would never match anything anyway.
What to put in it
| Good candidates | Why |
|---|---|
| Brand and company names | Frequently "translated" into nonsense by machine engines, especially when they are ordinary words in some language. |
| Product and model names | Customers search for the exact string; a translated model name is unfindable. |
| Technical terms with a house translation | Use Translate as… so every page uses the approved wording rather than a per-batch guess. |
| People's names | Names should not be localised. |
Keep the list tight. It is a list of exceptions, not a dictionary — every entry is checked against every captured string.
Related
To exclude a whole region of the page from translation rather than a term, use Exclusion selectors in Settings. To correct wording inside paragraphs, edit the translation in the translations workspace.