Adding Terms to a Glossary

Elevate your glossary game by seamlessly adding terms directly from Transifex.

Jacob avatar
Written by Jacob
Updated over a week ago

A glossary is empty until you add terms to it. When you add a term, you can specify its part of speech, potential source, and translation variants, add a translation for each project language, including comments about the term and translations, and define whether the term will be case-sensitive. You can add terms to a glossary within Transifex in a few ways.


Adding terms directly to a glossary

To add terms directly to a glossary:

  1. Head to your Glossaries from the main navigation

  2. Find the glossary to which you'd like to add a term and click the View glossary button.


  3. Click the Add new term button near the top right corner.

  4. Type the term you'd like to add to the glossary, select part of speech, and then hit Save in the popup.

  5. Back in the glossary, select the target language to which you want to add the translation.

  6. Look for the term you added earlier. Add the translation for that term, then click Save Translation.

📝Note: When you work in the "Edit Glossary Terms" mode and change multiple source terms without saving your changes, you can save them all at once by clicking the "Save all drafts" button. That way, you save all changes and keep any translations already submitted in the corresponding target languages.

⚠️Warning: There is a limit of 20K source terms you can add per Glossary. Please contact us in case you need to add more.


Adding terms to a glossary from the Editor

You can add terms to the glossary while in the Editor:

  1. From within the Editor, navigate to the Glossary tab.


    editor-glossary.png#asset:546
  2. Click Add term

  3. Type in the term you'd like to add to the glossary and select a part of speech and the translation for the term. Including a translation is optional.

  4. Click Add to add the term to the glossary.

The term will be added to the glossary associated with the selected project.

💡Tip: The first two steps above can be replaced by a keyboard shortcut when working in the Transifex Editor. Specifically, you can double-click on any term so it gets marked and then press G to add a variant, part of speech, and the translation if needed.

⚠️Warning: If your glossary translation terms contain extra spaces, enter, etc., please note that these are not copied in the translation box when translating your source strings in the editor.


Glossary variants

There are several situations where a term has a different meaning depending on the context (home for homepage, home for house), a different form if pluralized, or different gender or due to conjugation, etc. With variants, you can have one entry for all variants of a term and additionally add translation variants.

Adding a source variant

  1. Head to your Glossaries from the main navigation at the top

  2. Find the glossary to which you'd like to add a term and click the View glossary button.

  3. Select the source language at the top middle area.

  4. Click the Add new term button near the top right corner.

  5. Write the term and choose the Add variant(s) button to add as many variants as needed.

  6. Click on Save once you're finished.

Adding a translation variant

  1. Head to your Glossaries from the main navigation at the top

  2. Find the glossary to which you'd like to add a term and click the View glossary button.

  3. Select a target language at the top middle area.

  4. Click the Add new term button near the top right corner.

  5. Write the term, choose the part of speech, and click Save.

  6. Choose the newly added glossary term on the left, start typing the translation in the translation area, and click Save.

  7. Click on the Add variant(s) button to add more translation variants.

  8. Type the next translation variant and click Add. To add more variants, click again on the Add variant(s) button or on the plus icon next to Add. Remember to Save the changes.

Deleting variants

To delete the translation variants of a glossary term, select the desired target language at the top middle area, choose the term, scroll down in the bulk actions menu, and choose Delete.

To delete a source variant of a glossary term, select the source language at the top middle area, choose the term, and choose Delete in the bulk actions menu.


Adding notes to glossary terms

While creating a term for a glossary, you can provide even more context about the term by adding a note.

Once a term is added, you may add translation notes in one or more target languages.

  1. Head inside the glossary you want to edit

  2. From the language dropdown, select the language you want to edit

  3. Either search for the term or pick from the list.

  4. Under the term, click Αdd a note.

  5. Add your note, then click Save Note.


Uploading an existing glossary

Besides directly adding terms to a glossary inside the platform, Transifex lets you upload a pre-existing glossary. This is handy when you have a pre-existing glossary or many terms and want to create it offline before adding it to Transifex.


Case sensitive terms

In Transifex, you have two ways to define whether a new or existing glossary term will be case-sensitive.

Define case sensitivity through UI

Below, you can find how glossary terms can be defined as case-sensitive or not through the Transifex Web Interface.

Example #1:

While adding a new term or editing one, you can select whether the term will be case-sensitive through the respective checkbox.

Example #2:

If you add a glossary term while translating your project, select whether the term will be case-sensitive or not through the respective checkbox.

Define case sensitivity through a CSV glossary file

Upload a CSV glossary file, including the column is_case_sensitive. More information about the structure of the file can be found here.

The is_case_sensitive option works as follows:

  1. When new terms are added in the glossary for which the value of the is_case_sensitive column is y, yes, YES, true, or TRUE, then the term will be added to the Transifex Glossary with the case-sensitive field enabled.

  2. The case sensitivity field for existing terms is not being updated if the "OVERWRITE EXISTING ENTRIES" is disabled.

  3. The case sensitivity field for existing terms is being updated if the "OVERWRITE EXISTING ENTRIES" is enabled.


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