Glossary, tone of voice and formality

The glossary

Translations → Glossary is a list of terms and what they must become in each language: including "itself", for product names and for legal terms that have one correct rendering.

The glossary is sent with every translation request rather than applied afterwards, so the surrounding sentence is built around the required term instead of having it substituted in and reading like it.

Tone of voice

Each language has a tone of voice in your own words: "plain, short sentences, no exclamation marks", or "warm and a little playful, we say je and not u". It is passed to the model as an instruction.

This is worth more effort than it looks. Most of what people dislike about machine translation is register rather than accuracy, and register is the thing a sentence of instruction fixes.

Formality

Separately from tone, each language has a formality setting, for the languages where the choice is grammatical rather than stylistic: du and Sie, je and u, tu and vous. DeepL takes it as a parameter; the AI providers take it as part of the instruction.

Page context

By default WPGlotty tells the model what page a string came from and what is around it. A button reading "Book" is a verb on a hotel page and a noun in a shop, and the surrounding text is what settles it.

It costs a few more tokens per request. Turning it off saves money and buys you the classic machine-translation mistakes.