A name can appear in several forms across a book: a full name in narration, a title in dialogue, and a nickname between friends. A technical term may also carry a narrower meaning than its everyday equivalent. Preparing those decisions makes a whole-book translation easier to guide and review.
You do not need an exhaustive dictionary. A short, accurate brief is more useful than a long list that contains guesses or contradicts the text.
Make a small source-to-preference list
Choose names and terms that recur, define an important concept, or would confuse you if translated differently. Keep the original form beside your preference so you can locate it again.
| Source item | Preference to record | Context worth noting |
|---|---|---|
| A personal name | Established spelling or leave unchanged | Distinguish it from a title or nickname |
| An invented place | Preferred translation | Check whether similar words name different places |
| A specialist term | Standard target-language term | Include its subject or definition |
| An abbreviation | Retain or expand as appropriate | Identify the first definition in the book |
This is your preparation note, not a claim about an importable glossary feature. In PDF Craft, put the relevant preferences in the translation instructions field. The requests guide wording; they do not force every occurrence to follow a database rule.
If you are unsure about a term, mark the uncertainty rather than inventing a translation. A wrong preferred term can make an otherwise plausible result harder to interpret.
Add subject and voice without retelling the book
State the field or genre and the audience. An economics textbook, a historical essay, and a contemporary novel need different choices even when they share words.
A hypothetical technical brief might say:
This is an introductory economics book. Use standard economics terminology and clear English. Keep personal names, product names, and code identifiers unchanged.
For fiction, you might specify a narrator's tone and whether to retain meaningful titles. Do not supply a guessed plot summary or character relationship. Context helps only when it is accurate.
Regional preferences can be useful too: British English, American English, or a particular Spanish audience. Keep the request consistent with the book's intended voice rather than asking for both word-for-word syntax and a free adaptation.
Keep only instructions that change a decision
Remove generic requests for perfection and repeated adjectives. Prioritize the few choices you would actually check. Long unrelated material makes those choices harder to identify and can disclose private information that was unnecessary for the task.
Before upload, check spelling in the preference list, look for conflicts, and verify that each request applies to the actual source. Keep a copy with the original EPUB. See translation instruction examples for a concise submission brief.
Open the source EPUB and check its contents and navigation. Terminology notes cannot repair missing chapters or reliably recover text that was already corrupted during conversion.
Submit the complete EPUB with a clear output choice
In the EPUB translator, upload the file, select the target language, and choose translation-only or bilingual output. Bilingual output places each original passage before its translation, which can make terminology review easier.
Add your brief and inspect current task limits and Pricing before submitting. New users receive trial credits and translation is charged by usage. Download the completed task and keep the original separately.
Check recurrence and meaning together
Search an important name in early and late chapters. Compare its title and nickname as well as its spelling. For a technical term, inspect the definition and a later application. A consistent word can still be wrong if its meaning changes with context.
Record differences by chapter and a distinctive source phrase. Do not use global replacement as the first correction when a word has multiple meanings. Check whether the variation is justified before treating it as an error.
Also review negatives, numbers, and references around the term. Terminology consistency does not establish the accuracy of the whole claim. For text intended for publication or another demanding use, arrange the necessary qualified review.
If the file itself displays incorrectly, use the EPUB troubleshooting guide to separate language decisions from reader or structural problems. Good preparation gives you a clearer standard for the result, not a guarantee that review is unnecessary.