Glossary Terms Overridden When Using DeepL Plugin in Trados

We use the DeepL plugin for machine translation (MT) in Trados, combined with custom glossaries. However, we've noticed that glossary terms are occasionally overridden when translating in Trados, something that doesn't happen when using DeepL directly in the browser.

This issue has consistently occurred when translating into English, with the target language set to EN-GB. Our glossary uses Oxford spelling, so terms like characterized (with a "z") are intentionally included. The problem is that these terms are being "corrected" in the output to use an "s" instead, such as characterised, despite the glossary specifying the "z" spelling.

How can we solve this? Has anyone encountered a similar problem? What could cause this to happen? Thank you in advance.

Below a few screenshots of examples including the Task History in Trados. 

Example glossary entries:

Screenshot showing German terms 'charakterisiert', 'dadurch gekennzeichnet', and 'gekennzeichnet durch' translated to English as 'characterized', 'characterized in that', and 'characterized by'.

The output in Trados overruling the glossary when target language EN-GB is selected:

Screenshot of a Trados segment where the German text is translated to English with the word 'characterised' using an 's' spelling.

Same segment when target language EN-US is selected:

Screenshot of a Trados segment where the German text is translated to English with the word 'characterized' using a 'z' spelling.

Glossary in Browser works just fine:

 Screenshot of DeepL interface translating German text to English (British), showing the word 'characterized' with a 'z' spelling.

No hints to some kind of spelling correction by Trados in the Task History:

Screenshot of Trados Task History showing tasks like 'Scan', 'Convert to Translatable Format', and 'Copy to Target Languages' with timestamps.

Handling of glossaries according to DeepL:

https://developers.deepl.com/api-reference/multilingual-glossaries#language-variants

Screenshot of DeepL documentation explaining that glossaries apply to language variants, such as EN applying to both EN-US and EN-GB.



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[edited by: RWS Community AI at 8:37 AM (GMT 0) on 20 Nov 2025]
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  •   

    Thanks for that clarification.  Shame such a process is needed, but I guess we need to wait for DeepL to support glossaries in a more effective manner.

    In the meantime, you mention this is almost always used correctly, but sometimes it's not.  That makes it tricky and I think the first thing you need to do is demonstrate where it's not working by sharing an example of something we can reproduce.  So if you can provide the following small examples:

    1. sample source file
    2. sample csv

    Then we can test this ourselves specifically.  If it helps to reproduce the issue then a developer will almost certainly fix it.

    You also seem technical given your reference to the API documentation so you might also be interested to look at the source code too as this is an open sourced application: https://github.com/RWS/Sdl-Community/tree/master/DeepL%20Translation%20Provider

    The appstore team will welcome any pull requests from 3rd party developers who find a problem and fix it.  Often a faster way since we only need to validate the code and publish the fix.

    Paul Filkin | RWS

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