Glossary (brand terms)

Some words must never be translated: brand names, product names, internal jargon, hashtags. The Glossary is where you tell StoreLingo to leave these alone in every AI translation.

Adding a term

In the sidebar, find the Glossary section, click + Add term, type the exact string (case-sensitive). StoreLingo will protect this string in every AI translation from that point forward.

Multi-word terms are fine (Pro Max 2026). Punctuation is preserved. Hashtags work (#summer2026).

How it works under the hood

Before sending text to DeepL, StoreLingo replaces each glossary term with an XML placeholder (<x id="0"/>, <x id="1"/>, etc.). DeepL is called with ignore_tags=x, which tells DeepL not to translate or modify those tags. After translation, StoreLingo swaps the placeholders back to the original term in the translated string.

Example pipeline for the source Buy Acme Pro Max today, with Acme and Pro Max in the glossary:

1. Pre-process: Buy <x id="0"/> <x id="1"/> today
2. DeepL (target = French): Achetez <x id="0"/> <x id="1"/> aujourd'hui
3. Post-process: Achetez Acme Pro Max aujourd'hui

Compare without glossary: DeepL would have translated "Acme" (no proper noun signal) and "Pro Max" (literal "maximum pro") into French, producing garbage.

When to use it

• Brand names: Acme, StoreLingo, Webflow, your store's name.
• Product names: AirMax 90, MacBook Pro, any SKU-style identifier.
• Trademarks you want preserved verbatim.
• Hashtags: #summer2026, #newlaunch.
• Acronyms you want untouched: SaaS, B2B, RGB.
• Person names that appear in marketing copy (founder names, testimonial authors).
• Industry jargon you keep in English even in non-English markets (UX, frontend, growth marketing).

When NOT to use it

If a term has both translated and untranslated meanings (e.g., "Apple" the fruit vs. the brand), be careful: the glossary protects ALL occurrences of the string. Adding "Apple" to the glossary on a recipe site would leave the fruit untranslated in every recipe. For brand-specific protection that doesn't conflict with common nouns, prefer trademark-style spellings (e.g., the actual logo casing "Apple" vs. lowercase "apple") and make the glossary term case-sensitive enough that it only matches the brand.

Glossary vs Translation Memory

These are different tools:

• Glossary: a denylist of terms that must never be translated. Applied at request-time to every AI call.
• Translation Memory: a cache of past translations. Applied automatically; reuses previous results to save credits and ensure consistency.

You typically use both. Glossary protects the few dozen brand terms you care about; TM handles the long tail of repeated phrases.

Editing or removing a term

Click the trash icon next to any glossary entry in the sidebar to remove it. Removed terms stop being protected from the next AI run onward; already-translated content is not retroactively changed.

If you want to bulk-edit glossary terms or share them across sites, that's a roadmap feature. For now, glossary is per-site.

Why it's worth setting up before your first AI translate

Two reasons:

1. Once you've AI-translated 100 products with "Acme" rendered as "Sommet" in French, fixing it means re-translating those 100 products (or hand-editing each). Setting glossary first prevents the problem.
2. Translation Memory caches whatever DeepL returned. If "Acme" got translated to "Sommet" on the first run, that mistranslation is now in your TM and will be reused on the next run. You'd need to clear those TM entries to undo it.

Five minutes of glossary setup before your first AI translate saves an hour of cleanup later.