Glossary, tone of voice and formality

The glossary

Under WPGlotty → Glossary, set fixed translations, keep product names or legal terms unchanged, or ban words from translations. Rules can cover one language or all. You can import and export them as CSV.

WPGlotty sends the glossary with translation requests so your terms fit naturally into sentences. Google Translate cannot receive it, so WPGlotty flags translations that break its rules for review instead.

Style and tone

Describe each language’s tone in your own words: “plain, short sentences, no exclamation marks” or “warm and a little playful”. Be specific: accurate wording can still sound too formal or too casual. WPGlotty sends your instruction with translations that support tone. DeepL and Google Translate do not use tone instructions.

Under Settings, Translation settings, choose Close to the source (legal text and specifications), Natural (default) or Free (target-market rewrites). Facts, names and numbers stay. DeepL and Google Translate ignore this setting.

Formality

Formality is separate from tone. It controls grammatical choices such as du or Sie, je or u, and tu or vous. DeepL receives this as a parameter for supported target languages. Prompt-based providers receive it as a translation instruction. Google Translate does not use this setting.

During set-up, choose the form of address for each language you add. WPGlotty checks your site’s Dutch, German, French, Spanish or Italian text for an existing preference. It uses the form it finds as the starting choice and marks it “(detected)”.

Detection needs at least four words for “you”, with one form appearing at least twice as often as the other. If there is too little text or no clear preference, the setting shows “Not set” until you choose. The same happens when your source language is not one of those five, English for example.

New translations use the changed setting straight away, but existing translations stay as they are. To update them, use Translate everything again on the Translation status screen. You can choose one language or all languages. This sends the strings again, and you pay for the new translations. Text you edited by hand stays unchanged.

You can change it later under WPGlotty, then Languages, where each language has a Form of address field.

What your site is about

A sentence on its own may not reveal whether your site belongs to a law firm, a bakery or a machinery dealer. That context helps with word choice. WPGlotty builds a short profile from your site’s content and includes it in translation instructions.

You do not need to configure the profile or fill anything in. WPGlotty reads your content and updates the profile as your site changes. It helps choose vocabulary that fits your subject. DeepL and Google Translate do not use the profile.

Page context

By default, WPGlotty tells the model which page each string comes from, by its title and address. That helps with words that have two meanings: “Book” may be a verb on a hotel page or a noun in a shop.

Page context uses extra tokens but helps translate ambiguous text correctly. Turning it off reduces token costs and keeps instructions unchanged between pages, so your provider can cache them.