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Managing Data Sources in Lilt

In Lilt, all translation data is organized into Data Sources. Each Data Source is designated by a language pair and aggregates the following linguistic assets:

  • Translation Memory (one or many): A collection of source/target TM entries (previously translated segments). 
  • Termbase (zero or many): A collection of source/target TB entries (Termbase terms that help to maintain consistent terminology usage).
  • Contextual AI: A self-learning neural translation system.

Note that there can be more than one Data Source for a given language pair.

Each Project in Lilt is associated with one Data Source, and only uses the resources from that Data Source. Multiple Projects can share the same Data Source.

Managing your Data Sources

Managing your Data Sources is an important part of localization. To get started, navigate to the Data > Sources tab.

Data Sources are grouped into sections based on language pair. Use the search bar to filter Data Sources by language code or name.

Each Data Source is displayed as a card with the following information:

  • Data Source name
  • Data Source languages
  • date the Data Source was last updated

Create a Data Source

Data Sources can be created at any time under the Sources tab or during Job Creation.

To create a new Data Source through the Sources tab, click the New data source button in the upper-right.

This will open a popup box with the following fields to fill out in order to create your new Data Source:

  • Name: The name of the Data Source.
  • Source language: The source language of the Data Source.
  • Target language: The target language of the Data Source.
  • In-context learning: Whether to enable Lilt's Contextual AI for translation suggestions.
  • Force TB case-sensitivity: Whether to enforce term matches to respect case-sensitivity.


After filling in the fields, click the Create button to create the Data Source. Once created, you can Upload Memory Files to it, and you can make use of the Data Source in your Projects.

Default Data Sources

Whenever a Model is created that uses a new language pair, Lilt also creates a Default Data Source for that language pair. Default Data Sourcea are distinguished by the Default text next to the name.

Each language pair must have exactly one Default Data Source. The Data Source set as the default cannot be deleted. However, administrators and managers can change the Default Data Source for a language pair by clicking the dropdown and selecting the option to Set as default data source.

Delete a Data Source

Clicking the Delete button in the dropdown and confirm that you want to permanently delete the Data Source.

Edit a Data Source

Updating a Data Source will affect all Projects using that Data Source (with no latency). Your translators are guaranteed to always be working with the most up-to-date version of the Data Source.

Click on the Data Source name or the Edit button to open up the Data Source, where you can edit all the entries and settings of the selected Data Source.

From the Manage Entries page, you can access all the Data Source Settings and contents of the selected Data Source to Managing Termbase and Translation Memory Entries.

Manage resources

The Manage resources page on the left sidebar lets you Upload TB/TM Files to the selected Data Source.

  • Uploaded TM file entries are used in TM Matching to train the Data Source's Model.
  • Uploaded TB file entries provide Termbase references within Lilt Translate.

Manage QA rules

QA rules are a list of phrases that the QA check ignores when searching for QA issues. QA rules are tied to specific Data Sources.

Add or remove QA rules in a Data Source

For users with access to the organization’s Data Sources (which by default is Managers and Administrators), QA rules can be added and managed from Source > Manage QA.

From the Manage QA page, type in the Search bar to actively filter which rules are displayed.

To remove an existing rule, click on the trash can icon next to the rule.

To add a new QA rule, type the rule into the text box at the bottom and click the check mark.

Adding QA rules from within Lilt Translate

For users with Create/edit termbase data permissions (which by default is Managers and Administrators), QA rules can be added from inside Lilt Translate by following the step below.

  1. Open the File tab and click Run Auto Review. All found errors will be highlighted in red.
  2. Click on a red highlighted error to open the QA menu.
  3. In the QA menu, click Add "[error phrase]" to QA rules. This will add the error phrase to the QA rules of the associated Data Source.

Once an error is added to the QA rules, it will no longer show as an error when running a QA check.

Download Data Source Entries

While Data Sources cannot be downloaded in full, the translation memory and termbase entries can be downloaded.

To download all entries in a Data Source, click the Download button in the top right corner.

To download only specific TM entries or TB entries, open the Manage entrie page, select the desired entries, and then clicking the TM entries or TB entries button.


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