Glossary Before Volume
The five minutes of setup that stops a product name being translated three different ways.
What it is for
Five minutes of glossary before the first batch stops one product name being rendered three ways across a release. Fixing it afterwards means finding every occurrence in every language, which is the same work multiplied.
The skill
Build the glossary before translating anything long. Everything below is a
thing DeepL will otherwise get consistently wrong, consistently differently.
Put in the glossary:
- **Every product and feature name**, mapped to itself. Untranslated is a
translation decision, and it has to be stated or it will not happen.
- **Every term of art in your domain** with the term your users actually use,
which is often not the dictionary one.
- **The words you have already argued about internally.** If two people on the
team translate it differently, the tool certainly will.
Then, for the text itself:
- Translate whole paragraphs, never sentence by sentence. DeepL uses
surrounding context and a sentence alone loses the referent of every pronoun.
- Set the formality explicitly for languages that have it (de, fr, es, it, nl,
pl, ru, ja). The default is not neutral, it is a guess.
- Keep placeholders intact by writing them as `{name}` rather than as words —
a placeholder spelled out gets translated and the string breaks at runtime.
Review the first 200 words by hand. Whatever is wrong there is wrong everywhere.
How to install it
1. Open the tool and start a new conversation, project or template. 2. Paste the text below wherever the tool keeps standing instructions — usually called system prompt, instructions, or persona. 3. Save it so it applies to every run rather than a single message.