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Gluessary: A helping hand for translations with "goldfish memory"
Whenever you use an AI chat to translate a technical text, you are talking to Dory. It is a tabula rasa, the tool has no context about what you are going to do. You can create drafts or pre-instructions, but LLMs are designed to be complacent and ultimately make up things that look good on the surface, but may be very inaccurate.
It is ironic that the origin of LLMs were translation engines. yet even today, they struggle to provide a reliable solution for texts requiring technical rigor. Specialist translators remain vital, but too much of their work is now spent fixing the same inconsistencies that AI repeats over and over, no matter how many times we correct them.
While you learn the peculiarities of the tool, become a master in prompts, and improve the clues about which indications work and which don't, you accumulate knowledge. The agent does not, in each session he starts from scratch and does not remember the patterns you corrected yesterday.
For example, in the world of knitting and crochet, this is critical. Following and translating a pattern is like reading a score, a single misinterpreted «note» can ruin the whole project. Generic translators see «cast off» and think of taking off clothes, or «K2» and think of the mountain.
At StepAlong we help companies manage technical translations of product instructions using AI combined with glossaries. It is a robust solution for managing translations at scale.
However, after many conversations with all kinds of businesses, we realised that many freelancers and creators don't need such a sophisticated infrastructure, but rather a light day-to-day help. With that in mind, we decided to «package» that glossary logic into something much simpler:
Gluessary is a free browser-based translation tool where you manage your own glossaries. It's as simple as Google Translate but with «guardrails» for AI:
- You paste your text: Any pattern, recipe or technical document.
- Gluessary «locks» your terms: Find the abbreviations and jargon before the translation engine starts.
- AI translates with context: The model receives your glossary as a strict instruction. Specialised terms are respected, not interpreted.
What happens in your browser, stays in your browser. The text is processed for translation and discarded immediately, we don't save or log anything on our servers. In addition, you can use our default templates or create your own glossaries from scratch to make the tool speak exactly as you do.
Gluessary is a free experiment and uses basic AI models. If you are looking for professional results or higher speed, you can plug in your own Google AI API key in the settings.
Take a look at it, play around with it and let us know what you think. In the meantime, keep swimming, Dory.