The translation prompts below get AI models to translate for a specific locale and audience, keep your terminology consistent with a glossary, adapt tone and formality, and check their own output. Use them for drafts, internal content and first passes. Anything with legal, medical, safety or financial consequences still needs review by a qualified human translator before it ships.
How to use these prompts
Each prompt is ready to copy into ChatGPT, Claude or Gemini. Replace the blanks in double braces, or keep the default after the colon: {{target:German (Germany)}} means German as used in Germany unless you change it.
What improves results most:
- Name both languages. Anthropic's multilingual support docs say that explicitly stating the input and output languages improves reliability, and suggest asking for "idiomatic speech as if it were a native speaker" for fluency.
- Name the locale, not just the language. Spanish for Mexico and Spanish for Spain differ in vocabulary and formality. The W3C's guide to choosing language tags explains when a region subtag like
es-MXis worth adding. - Paste a glossary. Product names, feature names and legal terms drift when the model is left to choose.
- Mark the text clearly. Put the source between markers such as
<source>and</source>so instructions and content don't mix.
Which content needs a human translator?
Treat AI output as a draft for:
- Contracts, terms of service, privacy notices and anything with legal effect.
- Medical, pharmaceutical and safety information, including warnings and dosage.
- Immigration, court and official documents, which often require a certified translation.
- Financial disclosures and regulated marketing claims.
- Anything published under your brand in a language nobody on your team reads.
Anthropic notes that performance varies by language: its published table of scores relative to English puts Yoruba at 79.7% and 52.7% for the two models listed, against above 96% for Spanish. Even in strong languages, a fluent sentence can carry a wrong meaning, and a non-speaker can't tell. Prompt 13 helps you prepare a handoff for a reviewer.
Which prompts help translate text?
1. Translate for a locale and audience
The base prompt. Everything else on this page builds on it.
Translate the text from {{source:English}} to {{target:German (Germany)}}.
Audience: {{audience:customers using our app}}
Tone: {{tone:friendly, professional}}
Formality: {{formality:formal address (Sie)}}
Keep unchanged: {{keep:product names, code, URLs}}
Use idiomatic phrasing a native speaker would write, not a word-for-word
rendering. Keep the formatting (headings, lists, links) exactly.
Return the translation only. Then, under "Notes", list any phrase that was
ambiguous in the source, any idiom you replaced, and anything a reviewer
should double-check.
<source>
{{text}}
</source>
2. Translate UI strings and keep placeholders
For JSON or similar string files. Broken placeholders crash apps, so the prompt guards them.
Translate the values in this {{format:JSON}} string file from
{{source:English}} to {{target:French (France)}}. Do not change keys.
Rules:
- Keep every placeholder, variable and markup tag exactly as written,
including its position relative to the words it belongs to.
- Respect length: if a translation is much longer than the source, give a
shorter alternative in a comment.
- Use the glossary below for every listed term.
Glossary:
{{glossary}}
Strings:
{{strings}}
After the file, list strings where word order, plural forms or gender make
a single translation unreliable.
3. Back-translation check
A quick sanity check when nobody on the team reads the target language. It catches meaning drift, not style.
Here is a source text and its translation into {{target:Japanese}}.
1. Translate the translation back into {{source:English}} as literally as
possible.
2. Compare the back-translation with the source and list every difference
in meaning, tone or emphasis, with the segment involved.
3. Rate each difference: harmless, worth checking, or meaning changed.
Source:
{{source_text}}
Translation:
{{translation}}
4. Review an existing translation
For a bilingual review pass on a translation from a vendor, a tool or a colleague.
Review this {{source:English}} to {{target:Spanish (Mexico)}} translation.
Check each segment for: accuracy (meaning added, lost or changed),
terminology (against the glossary), grammar, locale conventions, tone, and
consistency. Give a table: segment number, issue category, severity (minor,
major, critical), the problem, a suggested fix. Don't rewrite segments that
have no issue.
Glossary:
{{glossary}}
Source and translation, segment by segment:
{{segments}}
Which prompts help with glossaries and terminology?
5. Build a glossary from source content
Run it once on your key docs and UI, then reuse the result everywhere.
Read the content below from {{product:our product}} and build a translation
glossary for {{target:German (Germany)}}.
Include: product and feature names, UI terms, domain terms, and recurring
phrases. For each term give: source term, part of speech, a short
definition in context, proposed translation, and "do not translate" where
the term should stay in the source language. Mark proposed translations
"needs review" so a native speaker confirms them.
{{content}}
6. Translate with a strict glossary
Use it once the glossary is approved.
Translate the text into {{target:Italian}} using this glossary. Glossary
terms are mandatory: use the approved translation every time, adjusting
only for grammar such as plural or case. Terms marked "do not translate"
stay as they are.
Glossary:
{{glossary}}
<source>
{{text}}
</source>
After the translation, list any glossary term you could not apply naturally
and why.
7. Consistency check across files
For a release where several people or tools translated different parts.
Below are translated strings from several files in {{target:Portuguese (Brazil)}},
with their source text.
{{strings}}
Find places where the same source term or phrase was translated in
different ways, and where the same translation is used for different source
terms. Group by term, show each variant with where it appears, and suggest
which to standardize on. Check against this glossary if provided:
{{glossary:none}}
Which prompts help with tone and localization?
8. Write a locale style guide
Decide tone and formality once, instead of per string.
Draft a short localization style guide for {{target:Korean}} for
{{product:our product}}, a {{product_type:consumer mobile app}}.
Cover: formality level and form of address, tone, how to handle English
product names and loanwords, punctuation and number conventions, date and
time formats, and units. Mark every choice "proposed" with the reason and
the main alternative, so a native-speaking reviewer can decide.
9. Adapt marketing copy, not just translate it
Taglines and puns rarely survive literal translation. Ask for options with back-translations.
Adapt this marketing copy for {{target:French (Canada)}}. The goal is the
same effect on the reader, not the same words.
Message to keep: {{message}}
Brand voice: {{voice:confident, plain, a little playful}}
<source>
{{text}}
</source>
Give 3 options. For each, include a literal back-translation in
{{source:English}} and a note on what changed and why. Flag any wordplay,
cultural reference or claim that may not work in this market.
10. Locale formats check
The W3C's localization vs. internationalization article lists things localization covers beyond words, such as numeric, date and time formats, currency, and address formats. This prompt checks those.
Check this {{target:German (Germany)}} content for locale conventions.
Look at: dates, times, numbers (decimal and thousands separators), currency
format and symbol position, units of measurement, phone numbers, addresses,
name order, and quotation marks. For each item, show what's in the text,
what the locale convention is, and the fix. Mark conventions you are not
sure about "verify".
{{content}}
11. Prepare source text for translation
Fixing the source is cheaper than fixing every language.
Review this {{source:English}} source content before it goes to
translation into {{languages:German, Japanese and Spanish}}.
Flag: idioms and culture-specific references, ambiguous sentences, strings
built by joining fragments together, text inside images, hard-coded dates
or currencies, assumptions about plural forms, and terms used
inconsistently. For each, suggest a rewrite that translates more reliably.
{{content}}
12. Translate a support reply in the customer's language
For support teams answering in a language the agent doesn't speak.
A customer wrote in {{customer_language:Spanish}}. Here is their message and
my draft reply in {{source:English}}.
1. Translate the customer's message into {{source:English}} so I understand
it, and note anything uncertain.
2. Translate my reply into {{customer_language:Spanish}}, matching the
customer's level of formality.
3. Do not add promises, refunds or details that aren't in my draft.
Customer message:
{{message}}
My reply:
{{reply}}
How do you hand off to a human reviewer?
13. Reviewer handoff with risk levels
Use it before a professional review, so the reviewer's time goes where the risk is.
Prepare this AI-assisted translation from {{source:English}} to
{{target:Arabic}} for review by a professional translator.
Give a table: segment number, source, translation, risk level (high,
medium, low), and the reason. Mark as high risk: legal, medical, safety or
financial content, numbers and dates, negations, names, and any segment
where you were unsure. Put high-risk segments first. Do not change the
translation itself.
{{segments}}
A clear handoff doesn't replace the review. For content where a mistake could hurt someone or create legal liability, the professional translator's version is the one that ships.
How do you check plural forms and gender?
Languages handle plurals very differently. Some have one form, others have several, and the rules for which number takes which form vary. The Unicode CLDR language plural rules chart lists the categories each language uses. When prompt 2 flags a string for plural or gender issues, check it against that chart and your i18n library's plural support rather than trusting a single translated sentence.
Keep your translation prompts and glossaries together
Prompts 1, 2 and 6 get reused on every release. Save them with your languages as defaults, keep the glossary next to them, and use a system prompt to pin the target language when you build translation into an app. The SKILL.md generator can turn the glossary prompt into a skill for Claude Code or Codex.
Kipt keeps prompts like these as Markdown files in a private GitHub repo you own. {{source}} and {{target}} stay as blanks you fill in, tags group prompts by language, and ⌘K finds them.