What a glossary does

A glossary tells Klaviyo to always translate specific words and phrases your way — brand names, product terms, or regional spelling — instead of leaving it to the default smart translation.

It's especially useful for:

• Brand and product names that shouldn't be translated at all, or that have an official localized form.
• Regional spelling, like translating "color" to "colour" for a British English audience.
• Store-specific terms — loyalty program names, size charts, or shipping terms your team has already translated by hand.
• URLs that need to point to a locale-specific version of your site.

Before you begin

A glossary is set for one source and target language at a time — for example, English → French. If you translate content into several languages, build a separate glossary for each pair.

Open glossary settings

1. From any page, go to Settings → Translations.
2. Select Glossary from the left-hand menu.
3. Use the Source Language and Target Language menus at the top of the page to choose the language pair you want to manage.

Add a term

1. With the right language pair selected, click + Add term.
2. Enter the word or phrase as it appears in your source content under Source term.
3. Enter the exact translation you want to use under Translation.
4. Click Save.
   

Replace one exact URL

Same idea as above, but the source term is a full URL — most often used to point a link at the locale-specific version of a page. Because it's an exact match, the destination can be completely different from the source; unlike a wildcard (below), it doesn't have to follow any pattern.

https://example.com/dog → https://example.fr/chien

The translated slug can be completely unrelated to the original — "dog" becomes "chien," not a rewritten version of "dog."

An exact URL entry only ever matches that exact URL. It won't accidentally catch a longer, different URL that happens to start the same way — https://example.com/dog/puppies and https://example.com/dog-toys are left completely untouched by the entry above.

Match a pattern in ordinary text

Use an asterisk (*) in a source term to match any text in that position, instead of a full exact word. Wildcards show up most often in URLs (next section), but they work the same way in plain text too.

Brand* → Marque*

Turns "BrandPremium" into "MarquePremium" — "Premium" is carried straight through, untranslated.

A wildcard term can include only one `*`, and it must include some fixed text — a term that's only * isn't supported. Use the Wildcards filter above the term list to see every wildcard entry in the current glossary at a glance.

Match a pattern in a URL

The most common use of a wildcard: rewriting a whole family of URLs to a different domain or path, without listing every single page.

https://example.com/*→https://example-france.fr/*

Converts https://example.com/hello to https://example-france.fr/hello — and works exactly the same way for any other page under that domain.

Which rule wins: exact vs. wildcard

Once you're using both exact entries and wildcard entries, it matters which one "wins" when more than one could apply to the same piece of content. Two rules govern this, and they always apply — you don't need to configure anything for them to take effect.

An exact entry always beats a wildcard for the text it covers

If an exact entry and a wildcard entry could both apply to the same text, the exact entry wins — every time, even if the wildcard would only partly overlap with it. The wildcard still applies normally to everything else.

What a wildcard captures is always protected from every other rule

There's one important exception to rule 1: the part of the text that the * itself matches is carried through completely untouched — even if a separate, unrelated exact entry in the same glossary would otherwise match a word inside it.

.../blog/* → .../blog-fr/*
newsletter → bulletin (a separate, unrelated entry)

.../blog/newsletter-signup becomes .../blog-fr/newsletter-signup — the word "newsletter" inside the captured segment is not swapped for "bulletin," because it's part of what the wildcard matched, not separate text the exact entry can reach.

Wildcard on the source, the target, or both

A wildcard entry has two sides — the source term and the translation — and each side can either carry an asterisk or not. Which side has it changes the entry's behavior completely:

Import terms from a CSV

If you're bringing in a large glossary — from a spreadsheet, a translation vendor, or another store — you can import it in one pass instead of adding terms one at a time. That process, including the file format and import options, is covered in its own article: Import glossary terms from a CSV.

Find, edit, and remove terms

• Use the search field above the term list to find a term by name.
• Switch between All and Wildcards to filter the list down to just your pattern-matching entries.
• Open the ⋮ menu at the end of any row to edit or delete that term.

Good to know

• One glossary per language pair. Switching the Source or Target Language menu shows you a different glossary, not a filtered view of the same one.
• Matching is case-sensitive and whole-term. Add separate entries for different capitalizations if your content uses more than one.
• Changes apply going forward. Editing or removing a term doesn't rewrite content you've already translated — it takes effect the next time that content is machine-translated.
• Wildcards are limited to one per term, and need at least some fixed text alongside the *.
• Only the source term's * makes an entry a wildcard. A * in the translation only does something if the source term has one too — otherwise it's just a literal character in your translation.
• An exact entry always beats a wildcard for any text they both could apply to — even a partial overlap, not just an identical match. You don't need to remove a broader wildcard to special-case one page; just add an exact entry for it alongside the wildcard.
• What a wildcard captures is off-limits to other rules. The free-form part matched by * always passes through untouched, even past an unrelated exact entry that would otherwise match a word inside it.