Guide · Getting more out of it
Glossary, dictionaries and memory
Make Traxlate use your terms — your glossary is enforced, topic dictionaries suggest, and the memory reuses what you already translated.
Updated · 2 min read
Three things make a second translation better than the first, and all three live on your device.
Your glossary
A glossary entry is a source term and the target term you want, for a language pair. It is enforced: when the source term appears, the translation uses your term, and when the engine's sentence cannot be fitted around it the note under the sentence says so rather than silently ignoring you. Add entries from Settings, from the term panel beside a result, or by importing a CSV file.
Entries are stored in your browser or app. With Pro, sync sends your glossary and history (and, from the browser, your translation memory) — encrypted on your device — to our server so another signed-in device can fetch them.
Topic dictionaries
Pick a topic (legal, medical, technical, and so on) and Traxlate loads a dictionary of terms for it from traxlate.com. A dictionary suggests: matching terms appear as chips beside the result, and one click promotes a suggestion into your glossary, where it becomes enforced. Dictionaries never rewrite a sentence on their own. We measured the alternative — forcing dictionary terms into every sentence — and it made translations worse, so suggestion is the rule.
Translation memory
The memory holds your corrections, not the machine's output. When you edit a sentence in the Desk or in a result, the source and your corrected translation are remembered for that language pair; the next time the same sentence comes back — the boilerplate paragraph in every contract, the safety line on every label — your correction is used instead of a fresh draft. Machine output is never cached, so an uncorrected sentence is always translated afresh with the current checks.
The memory is on your device and is not shared between people. It travels with sync only if you turn sync on.
Sharing a glossary with a team
A glossary can be shared by link. Whoever opens the link gets the entries into their own glossary and can accept later updates from you. Sharing sends the glossary to our server for the link to work; it is the one thing in this section that does, and the share page says so.
- Does the glossary work in documents and PDFs too?
- Yes. The same enforcement applies wherever a sentence is translated — Translate, Documents, PDF, Pictures, Talk.
- Can I export my glossary?
- Yes. Export CSV in Settings writes a file with the term, the translation, the language pair and whether the match is case-sensitive; Import CSV reads the same format back.