Step 4.2 Translation configuration

🎯 Objective

Enable precise and consistent multilingual translation of product data by controlling which attributes to translate, how, and in which languages — while improving output quality with linguistic guidance.

✅ Key Benefits

• 🏷️ Attribute selection:
  • Choose one or more product attributes to translate (e.g. description, seo_title, short_label).
• 🌍 Locale targeting:
  • Select one or more target locales, directly based on the locales configured in Akeneo.
  • Supports multiple destination languages in one operation.
• ♻️ Overwrite management:
  • Choose whether to overwrite existing translations or translate only when empty, allowing for safe updates.
• 🧠 Translation enhancement tools:
  • 📘 Glossary: enforces consistency for brand terms, technical words, or fixed expressions.
  • 🧾 Lexicon: allows you to define expected translations for specific terms.
  • 🧭 Custom instructions: guide the LLM in tone, formality, or context-specific rules (e.g. "translate in marketing tone", "keep dimensions untranslated").
• 🔁 Reusable and automatable:
  • Configuration can be saved and reused for recurring translation workflows.

💡 Example use case

A global product team wants to translate the attributes long_description and seo_title from French (fr_FR) into English (en_GB), German (de_DE), and Spanish (es_ES) — all defined in their Akeneo configuration.

They select only empty fields to avoid overwriting validated content, apply a glossary for key watchmaking terms, and define custom instructions to preserve technical specs without translation.

Once configured, the translation runs automatically for all matching products, maintaining tone and consistency across locales.

⚙️ Configuration

Step 1: Characteristics to be translated

• Attributes: Add one or more attributes to be translated (e.g., description, name).
• Channel: Mandatory if the attribute is scoped (e.g., ecommerce, mobile).
• Override existing values: If enabled, replaces current values with the new translations.
• Translate all localised attributes: If enabled, translates all attributes that are localized for the target locales in one execution.

Step 2: Source and Target Languages

• Source: Choose the source locale (e.g., en_US).
• Targets: One or multiple target locales (e.g., fr_FR, de_DE, etc.).

Step 3: Context (optional)

Use these fields to enhance translation quality:

• Lexicon: A short list of words to avoid missed or incorrect translations when words have multiple meanings.
• Custom instructions: Free text field to give the AI specific guidance (e.g., “Use formal tone”, “Do not translate brand names”).
• Glossary: Pre-defined glossary for the target language(s). Only glossaries matching the target locales will be used.