PTC’s AI applies your terminology, tone, and style guide to every translation, keeping your brand voice consistent in all languages.
PTC is an AI translation platform for software and apps. Setup takes a few minutes: you define your product, your audience, and the terms that matter to your brand. From that point on, every translation uses that context automatically.
PTC maintains brand consistency through three features:
- An AI a translation engine that uses your brand context on every translation, not just the first one
- Tone and formality settings based on your audience
- A custom glossary for terminology control
These three features work together, but they rely on the information you provide during setup. The sections below explain what each feature does and how to get the most out of it.
How PTC Learns Your Audience and Tone
The first three steps of PTC setup give it the context it needs to create AI translations that are accurate, natural, and appropriate for your audience.
Your Source File
Setup begins when you upload your resource file. PTC analyzes it immediately, looking at the language you use, your writing style, and the terminology already present in your content. This gives PTC a baseline understanding of how you communicate.
Target Languages
Next, you select the languages you want to translate into and your original language. For languages with regional variants, such as Spanish, you can specify which variant you are targeting. Spanish in Spain and Spanish in Latin America follow different formality conventions, vocabulary preferences, and tone norms. This gives PTC language-specific context before you describe your product.
Product and Audience Context
You then provide your product name, what it does, and who it is for. PTC uses this to determine the right tone for each target language automatically.
The tone that works for a legal document platform is not the same tone that works for a travel app. The more specific you are, the more accurately PTC can translate. “A project management tool for remote engineering teams” gives PTC more to work with than “a tool for professionals.” Think about who actually uses your product and how they would describe it.
When your description is not specific enough, PTC will flag it and offer alternatives. You can accept them or keep what you wrote.
How Tone and Formality are Set
PTC does not ask you to select a tone manually. Instead, it combines the linguistic and cultural norms of each target language with your audience description to determine the right level of formality and tone for each language.
This means the same product description can produce a more formal register in German and a more conversational one in Brazilian Portuguese, based on what is natural in each language for your type of product and audience.
Defining Your Terminology
The terminology step in the setup wizard allows you to define how specific terms should be handled in translation. You can specify whether a term should be kept in its original form, or translated in a specific way in each target language.
This step matters because PTC translates your files immediately after project setup, before you reach the dashboard. Getting your terminology right here means your first translations are already on-brand, without a round of corrections afterward.
Types of Terms PTC Handles Automatically
Before you add anything, PTC already:
- Adds your product name to the glossary
- Identifies terminology and tone suited to your product and audience
- Correctly translates widely recognized names like Google, Apple, or Amazon without a glossary entry
What Terms to Add Yourself
Focus on terms that are specific to your product and easy to misunderstand without context:
| Term | Add to the glossary? | Why |
|---|---|---|
| SmartQueue | Yes | Branded name that should stay untranslated |
| queue | No | Common word PTC translates correctly on its own |
| CartFlow (our plugin) | No | Keep extra information out of the term field |
| checkout + one-click checkout | No | Duplicate and overlapping entries cause translation issues |
| flux-cored | Yes | Technical term that needs a consistent, specific translation |
For full guidance on adding and managing glossary entries, see how to use the glossary in PTC.
Custom Rules for On-Brand Translations
Custom Rules is an optional setting available in the PTC dashboard under Settings. It lets you write free-form, language-specific instructions that guide the AI when translating into a particular target language. You can define one rule per language.
Most projects will not need this. The setup steps already capture the tone, formality, and terminology context PTC needs to produce on-brand translations. Custom Rules are useful when you have a very specific requirement for a target language.
Try PTC free for 30 days
Translate up to 20,000 words into 2 languages at no cost and see how PTC applies your terminology, tone, and audience context from the first translation.
