This feature is available starting from the Essential plan and above.

A glossary helps maintain consistency across project translations. Any contributor can add terms to the project glossary. When a term from the glossary is used in the source language translation, it will automatically appear in the editor's inline suggestion box.

Getting started

To begin, open your project and navigate to the Glossary page by clicking the corresponding menu item:

If your glossary is empty, you'll be prompted to add new entries:

If your glossary already contains terms, you'll see a different screen:

Here, you can filter, sort, and search your entries, as well as add new entries and perform other actions.

Let's start by adding a new entry.

Adding glossary entries

To add a new entry to the glossary, press the Add term button:

On the General tab, you can provide the following information:

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Term — the term you want to add to your glossary.
General description — an optional explanation of your term that will be visible to translators. This description will be shown if a description for the source (base) language is not provided.
Non-translatable — indicate whether the term should be translatable. Some acronyms like "PNG" or "HTML" are non-translatable, whereas terms like "browser" or "website" need to be translated.
Case-sensitive — specify whether your term is case-sensitive. For example, acronyms like "PNG" or "BMP" can be marked as case-sensitive.
Forbidden — enable this option if the term must not be used in translations.
Tags — add up to three tags to your glossary entry. You can choose existing tags or create new ones.

Next, proceed to the Translations and descriptions tab:

Here, you can translate your term into the project languages and optionally provide translated descriptions. These descriptions will be displayed alongside the general term (or source language) description for the matching terms. Note that the Translations and descriptions tab will not be accessible if you've set the Translatable option to Off.

Please note that it is not mandatory to provide translations for the term before adding it to the glossary.

Extract terms

Maintaining consistent translations across your project is crucial. The Extract terms feature allows you to automatically identify and add frequently repeated terms to the glossary.

To get started, navigate to the Glossary page and click More > Extract terms:

You’ll see the following dialog:

Min. word occurrence — words that appear at least this many times will be extracted.
Min. word length — only words of this length or longer will be extracted.
Ignore words containing numbers — if checked, words that include numbers will be ignored and not extracted.

Once you've set your preferences, click Extract. All identified words will be added to the glossary as regular terms.

Managing existing glossary entries

After a new term is added, it will appear on the Glossary page.

Here’s what you can see:

Term — the actual term (e.g., "router").
General description — the term’s description (e.g., "Network device").
Languages — the languages into which this term has been translated (e.g., French and Russian).
Tags — any tags associated with the term (e.g., "network").
Added by — the person who added the term and the date it was added (e.g., Jan 5, 2023, added by Ilya).

You can also:

Delete the term or find all the keys containing this term in the current project by selecting the See in project menu item.

You can switch between the grid and list views using the controls in the top menu:

Use the search bar to find a specific term (you can enable or disable case-sensitive search):

Filter and sort your glossary entries using the corresponding dropdowns:

To delete all glossary entries, click More > Delete all:

Downloading and uploading terms in CSV format

If you're having trouble working with glossary files, refer to the Frequently asked questions for solutions to common problems.

You can export all glossary entries and their translations to your PC in CSV format by clicking More > Download CSV on the Glossary page:

Terms can also be imported into the glossary from a CSV file by clicking More > Upload CSV.

When preparing a CSV file for upload, please follow these guidelines:

Separators — use semicolons (;) as separators. Other separators, like commas, are not supported. Double-check that you’re using the correct separators, as this is the most common issue encountered when uploading CSV files.
Header row — the file must contain a header row.
Columns — the columns in your file should be organized as follows:
1. Term — the term you want to add.
2. Description — the term's general description.
3. Casesensitive — this can be either yes or no.
4. Translatable — this can be either yes or no.
5. Forbidden — this can be either yes or no.
6. Tags — a comma-separated list of tags, or this field can be left empty.
7. Language ISO code columns — each subsequent column should be named after the language ISO code as defined in your project (e.g., ru or de_DE). These columns contain the term definitions in the respective languages or can be left empty.
8. Language description columns — following the language ISO code columns, include columns named LANG_ISO_description (where LANG_ISO is the locale code as defined in your project, e.g., fr_description). These columns contain term descriptions in the respective languages or can be left empty.
Encoding — the uploaded file must be encoded in UTF-8.
Blank translations — uploading a file with a language column but leaving the translations blank will remove these translations if they exist in the project.

Here's an example of a valid .csv file:

Reuploading CSV files

When you upload a CSV file with glossary entries, all existing entries with the same terms will be updated. However, if one or more languages are omitted from your CSV file, the corresponding translations and descriptions will remain unchanged.

For example, suppose you have a glossary term "router" with translations and descriptions in French and Arabic. If you upload a CSV file with an updated French translation for "router" but no data for Arabic, the French translation will be updated in your glossary, while the Arabic translation and description will remain unchanged.

Using glossary entries

Every detected term will be displayed in the translation editor:

You’ll see the actual term, its general description in the base language (English in the example above), its translation, and its description in the target language (if available). You can also view who added the term, when it was added, and any tags attached to the entry (though some entries may not have tags).

Click on the term to insert it into the translation editor box.

Stemming of glossary terms

Lokalise uses stemming to automatically match glossary terms to different word forms.

Stemming is the process of reducing a word to its base or root form, which can then be combined with various prefixes and suffixes. This means that similar word forms will be matched based on their root.

Example: If you have the term "Change" in your Glossary, it will automatically match with related forms such as "change," "changing," "changes," "changed," and "changer."

Stemming is currently supported in the following languages: Catalan, Danish, Dutch, English, Finnish, French, German, Italian, Norwegian, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Spanish, and Swedish.

When creating a glossary term, you can manually separate word forms with commas, such as "account,accounts,accounted." In this case, automatic stemming will not be applied, and the text will be matched to one of the specific forms provided in the glossary term.

Glossary terms and spelling checks

Terms added to the glossary are exempt from built-in spelling and grammar checks. Below are a few real-life examples:

Case 1

Scenario: A glossary term is added first, and later, a new translation is added that matches the glossary term.
Outcome: The translation is not highlighted by the spell-checker.

Case 2

Scenario: A translation already exists in the project. A new glossary term is added, and the translation is updated to match the glossary term.
Outcome: The updated translation is not highlighted by the spell-checker.

Case 3

Scenario: A translation already exists in the project and is underlined in red by the spell-checker. A new glossary term is added that matches the translation.
Outcome: The translation remains highlighted until it is hovered over, at which point the highlighting is removed.

Key tags and glossary entries

Tags are case-sensitive. For instance, if your tag is named "api" (lowercase), the "API" (uppercase) glossary entry won't be displayed.

Glossary entries are also displayed for key tags. For example, if you have a translation key with the "API" tag and then create a new glossary entry:

When you start translating the key with the "API" tag, the glossary entry is displayed:

The glossary entry will be shown with a special "label" icon, indicating that it is related to the tag, not the actual key value.

Shared glossary

The Shared glossary feature is available from the Pro plan and above.

You can share the glossary to make it available for other projects within the team. To set up glossary options, go to More > Settings:

There are three available options:

Keep the glossary private for this project — the glossary remains private and cannot be used in other projects (this is the default option). note that a single project can only have one glossary.
The glossary is shared and may be used in other projects — this option allows other projects to utilize terms from this project's glossary.
Use a shared glossary from another project — the current project uses a shared glossary from another project. To use this option, another project within the team must have the "The glossary is shared" option enabled.

The shared glossary can be modified in any project, meaning you can edit existing terms and add new ones. These changes will immediately take effect in all other projects within the team that use the same glossary. However, certain actions, such as term deletion, can only be performed in the original glossary.

Glossary permissions

Role	Glossary type	Accessed from	Create term	Read terms
Contributor	Regular	N/A	yes	yes
Manager	Regular	N/A	yes	yes
Contributor	Shared	Original project	yes	yes
Manager	Shared	Original project	yes	yes
Contributor	Shared	Linked project	yes	yes
Manager	Shared	Linked project	yes	yes

Role	Glossary type	Accessed from	Update term	Delete term	CSV download
Contributor	Regular	N/A	yes	no	yes
Manager	Regular	N/A	yes	yes	yes
Contributor	Shared	Original project	yes	no	yes
Manager	Shared	Original project	yes	yes	yes
Contributor	Shared	Linked project	yes	no	yes
Manager	Shared	Linked project	yes	no	yes

Role	Glossary type	Accessed from	Delete all terms	Extract terms	CSV upload
Contributor	Regular	N/A	no	no	no
Manager	Regular	N/A	yes	yes	yes
Contributor	Shared	Original project	no	no	no
Manager	Shared	Original project	yes	yes	yes
Contributor	Shared	Linked project	no	no	no
Manager	Shared	Linked project	no	no	no

Manager role means a project admin with the "Manage glossary" permission set on the project level.

Frequently asked questions

Will machine translation engines use glossary entries? Will these entries be visible when creating professional translation orders?

Machine translation engines do not take the glossary into account. However, AI translations will use your glossary entries when applicable.

If you’re creating a professional translation order, glossary entries won’t be shared with translators if you choose Gengo as the provider. To ensure translators see glossary entries or translation memory suggestions, please choose Lokalise as the provider.

Can I automatically apply glossary entries to existing translations?

The glossary is meant for reference, and there’s no option to automatically apply it to translations.

You can update translations using the Find and replace control or by manually searching for the term and updating the translations where needed.

Can I attach a screenshot to the glossary term?

No, it's not possible. Screenshots can only be attached to translation keys.

When uploading my CSV file with glossary entries, I keep getting weird errors! What’s going on?

If you encounter errors when uploading a CSV glossary file to Lokalise:

The most common issue is using improper delimiters. Your CSV file must use semicolons (;) as separators. Using any other delimiters (commas, tabs, spaces) will result in an error.
Ensure you’re using the Unicode (UTF-8) character set for the CSV file. Avoid other encodings like ASCII or UTF-16.
Make sure to include a header row, as explained in the Downloading and uploading section.

These issues are typically observed when the file is created using applications such as Google Sheets or Excel and is not saved in the correct format.

We recommend using LibreOffice and ensuring that the character set is UTF-8 and the separator is a semicolon.

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I have uploaded my glossary to the project, but for some reason, I cannot see any suggestions for the target language. Why?

This issue might occur if you’re using different regional codes. For example, if your project uses French (fr) as a language but the glossary has entries for the French Belgium (fr_BE) locale, these suggestions won’t be displayed for fr.

In this case, you’ll need to either adjust your glossary by changing the fr_BE language code to fr or modify the target language settings in the project itself, as explained in the Language settings article.

I have a glossary CSV file that was previously uploaded to a project. I removed a few entries from this file and re-uploaded it to the same project. What will happen to the removed terms?

These terms will remain intact in Lokalise, and you’ll need to remove them manually. Alternatively, you can remove all entries from the glossary by clicking Delete all and then re-upload the new CSV file.

I cannot manage the glossary in my project even though I have proper access rights. Why?

In most cases, this means that your current project uses a shared glossary from another project within the team. To double-check this, open the project settings and find the Glossary options section:

If it says "Use a shared glossary from project," it means that certain changes to the glossary (for example, term deletion) must be made in the project selected in the dropdown.

Do you provide an API endpoint to upload/download glossaries and manage glossary entries?

No, currently we do not offer such an endpoint.

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