Smartcat Translation Quality Checklist

Introduction

Translation quality isn't just about which AI engine or linguist is doing the work — it's about how much context and structure you give Smartcat to work with. The more your workspace is set up to capture your brand voice, your terminology, and your institutional knowledge, the more consistent, accurate, and "native-sounding" your translations become — and the less time your reviewers spend fixing avoidable mistakes.

Below are six features available in your Smartcat account today. You don't need to implement all of them at once — even adopting one or two can noticeably improve your translation quality. Think of this as a checklist: the more of these you put in place, the stronger your results will be. Your Smartcat contact is happy to help you set up any or all of them.

Translation Memories (or Reviewed Translations)

A Translation Memory (TM) is a database that stores every segment, usually a sentence, that has been translated and approved within your Smartcat account. Each entry pairs a source-language segment with its confirmed target-language translation. Once a linguist or reviewer confirms a segment in the editor, that pairing is saved automatically and becomes available for reuse in future projects.

[Translation Memory: Overview, Setup, and Management]

[Translation Memory: Advanced Configuration]

Glossaries (or Terminology)

A Glossary (also called Terminology) is a list of specific words or short phrases, along with exactly how each one should — or should not — be translated. Typical entries include product names, brand terminology, trademarks, technical or industry-specific vocabulary, and terms that must remain untranslated in every language.

[Glossaries and Terminology: Overview, Setup, and Management]

Reference documents

Reference Documents are supporting materials — such as style guides, prior versions of similar content, background information, or related images and videos — that you upload to Smartcat to give linguists, reviewers, and your AI coworkers additional context about the content being translated. Unlike source files, reference documents are not translated themselves; they exist solely to inform and improve the translation of your actual content.

[Reference Files: Giving Linguists Context]

[Extracting Linguistic Assets with Intelligence Fabric]

Translator Coworker

A Translator Coworker (formerly called a Translation Agent) is an AI-powered translation engine inside Smartcat that you configure to translate your content — built on top of a large language model (LLM) such as Google Gemini, OpenAI's latest GPT model, or Anthropic's Claude. Unlike a generic AI translation engine, a Translator Coworker can be customized with a tailored Translation Skill (system prompt) that teaches it about your business, your brand voice, your audience, and your terminology — so its output reads less like "translated" and more like it was written natively for each target market.

[Translator Coworkers in Smartcat]

AI Translation Profile

An AI Translation Profile is a pre-configured set of rules in your Smartcat workspace that controls how translation engines and linguistic assets (Translation Memories and Glossaries) work together whenever AI translation runs. A profile defines which Translation Memories and Glossaries are applied, which AI/machine translation engine is used for each language pair, whether a fallback engine is used if the primary engine fails, and whether AI translation is used at all for a given workflow. Profiles can be created per client, department, brand, or use case, and applied automatically to new projects.

[AI Translation Profiles: Configuring Linguistic Assets and Translation Engines]

Project Templates

A Project Template is a saved, reusable configuration of project settings in Smartcat. Instead of manually re-entering the same settings every time you start a new job — source and target languages, workflow stages, Translator Coworkers, translation memories (TMs), glossaries, deadlines, and assignment rules — you configure them once in a template, and every new project created from that template automatically applies the same setup.

[Project Templates in Smartcat]