PTC: AI translation that keeps your brand terms and tone

To keep brand terms and tone, AI translation needs your glossary, your product's context and your style guide. PTC applies all three to every translation.

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.

How PTC Learns Your Audience and Tone

The first steps of PTC setup give it the context it needs to create AI translations that are accurate, natural, and appropriate for your audience.

1Your 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.

2Target Languages

Next, you select your source language and the languages you want to translate into. 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 review your product description.

3Product and Audience Context

PTC automatically generates a product description based on your source file. Review the description and keep it or edit it to better describe your product and its audience. PTC uses this context to determine the right tone for each target language automatically.

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.

What Terms to Add Yourself

Focus on terms that are specific to your product and easy to misunderstand without context:

For full guidance on adding and managing glossary entries, see how to use the glossary in PTC.

What Is The Glossary in PTC?

The glossary is a list of important terms that PTC uses to guide translations. You define how each term should be translated (or whether it should remain the same), and how PTC should apply those rules across all target languages.

For example, the word “Target” might mean:

1. A goal in a fitness app
2. An enemy in a shooting game
3. A brand name in a retail app (that should remain untranslated)

By adding this term to your glossary, you help PTC apply the right meaning based on your software.

Best Practices for Adding Glossary Entries

To get the most out of the glossary in PTC, follow these tips:

1Only Add Critical Terms

Focus on terms that are important to your project and easy to misunderstand. These include technical terms, brand names, or ambiguous words. Avoid adding terms like “Google”, “Apple”, or “Amazon”. PTC handles them correctly without a glossary entry.

2Enter Terms Exactly as They Should Appear

Avoid adding extra symbols, notes, or descriptions inside the term field. Just enter the term exactly how you want it to appear in translations.

3Use the Singular Form

You don’t need to add plural forms for a particular term. PTC will handle pluralization and contextual translation.

4Avoid Duplicates

Make sure to add each term only once. Repeated entries can confuse the system and reduce translation quality.

5Only Add Verbs If Necessary

Most verbs don’t need glossary entries. Add them only if:

• They appear only in buttons or action labels
• They have different meanings depending on context
• You want a specific conjugation or phrasing

Syncing your WPML glossary

If your website uses WPML, link the site to your PTC project. PTC then syncs the two glossaries every 24 hours, in both directions, so your website and your software use the same terms. You can also start a sync by hand after you change a term.

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.

Five habits that raise translation quality

• Write clear, complete interface texts. A text that is ambiguous in English is ambiguous in every language. See how to prepare your software for translation.
• Describe your product and audience in detail. PTC translates for the reader you describe.
• Add your important product terms to the glossary.
• Use placeholders for dynamic text, never sentences glued from fragments.
• Design your interface for different text lengths. See how to prevent long translations from breaking your layout.

Last updated: November 11, 2026