Prompt Engineering Technique Enforces Glossary Compliance in AI Translation

A structured prompting approach has been proposed to address three common AI translation failures: substituting glossary terms with synonyms, dropping placeholders, and making unwarranted grammatical choices. The method uses a two-part system — a detailed prompt with strict glossary and placeholder rules, followed by a validation gate to catch any errors the prompt misses. A key design choice separates permitted inflections from forbidden synonym substitutions, while also instructing the model to restructure sentences rather than swap terms when needed. The prompt returns structured JSON output including fields for glossary usage, forced grammatical choices, and noted ambiguities, enabling systematic review. The approach specifically accounts for inflection-heavy languages like German, Arabic, and Finnish, where citation-form glossary matching would otherwise fail silently.