Environment

This article applies to all known versions of Acrolinx where multiple languages are in use.

Question

When creating a term, I would like to assign it to multiple languages to make it easier to maintain.  Is it possible to assign a term to multiple languages?

Answer

Yes. When creating a term, it's possible to select "Multiple Languages" in the language drop-down, allowing the term to be used for all languages.

However, when a term is assigned to multiple languages, inflections of that term are no longer considered as the inflections may vary across the languages.

As an example, both English and German use the word "Film", however the plural in English is "Films" while the plural in German is "Filme".  As a result, separate terms would be needed for the inflections if the term "Film" is used for multiple languages.

This use case is most common for product or brand names, where the number of possible inflections is limited.

For more details, please see the Term Settings article.