ManuAI
VI

Lesson 195 · 3 min

Translation with the right terms

Give the AI a short glossary of your company's terms and the reader's context, and its translations stop sounding generic.

AI translation is fluent but tends to pick the most common word. In your company, "lead" might mean a sales contact, "PO" a purchase order and "line" a production line. A general translation can get all three wrong.

Fix this with a small glossary at the top of your prompt: each term, the translation you use, and anything that must stay in English. Add who will read it and how formal it should be.

For important documents, ask for a back-translation into the original language. If the meaning drifts, you will see it, even if you do not read the target language well.

Contracts, safety instructions and medical or legal text still need a qualified human translator to check them. AI is a fast first draft for those, never the final word.

Do it now

Build a ten-word glossary

  1. 1. List ten terms your team uses that outsiders get wrong.
  2. 2. Write the translation you want for each one.
  3. 3. Use the prompt below on a real paragraph and compare it with a plain translation.
Translate the text below from [ENGLISH] to [VIETNAMESE] for [READER, e.g. factory supervisors]. Tone: [polite but direct]. Use this glossary exactly:
- [TERM] = [TRANSLATION]
- [TERM] = keep in English
After the translation, list any phrases you were unsure about.

[PASTE TEXT]

Quick check

What most improves an AI translation of a work document?

What most improves an AI translation of a work document?

Keep going

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More on this

Words from this lesson

Prompt
The instruction or question you give an AI. Clearer prompts with context usually get much better answers.
Few-shot prompting
Including a few examples of what you want in your prompt so the AI copies their style and format.
NLP
The field of computing that deals with understanding and producing human languages like English, Hindi or Swahili.