The Terminology Board is wxrks' review workflow for new glossary terms: a kanban-style board where a requested term moves through lanes like New, In Progress, and Rejected or Published before it becomes part of your live glossary. This article covers setting up the board, requesting a term, working the board day to day, and keeping it in sync with Phrase.
💡 Who is this for? This guide is for Account_Admin and Project_Manager who need to set up and manage the Terminology Board's request-review-publish workflow for glossary terms. Any user with permission to manage glossary terms — including a Linguist working directly in the Editor — can also submit a term request through the board.
Terminology Board, Glossaries, and Learning Terms: what's the difference?
The Terminology Board is not where you build a glossary from scratch, and it's not the same as automatic AI term extraction. If you haven't set up glossaries yet, start with All about Glossaries and How to create a Glossary.
This article is also not the same topic as Learning Terms, which automatically extracts terms from your source content and adds them to a glossary using AI, with no human review step. The Terminology Board is the opposite case: it exists specifically for terms a person requests — from the Glossary or the Editor — and routes each one through a review lane before it's published.
1. Setting up the Board (Account_Admin)
Before anyone can request a term, an Account_Admin needs to set up the board's lanes once, under Settings > Account Settings > Business > Terminology Board.
Each row in the Board Lanes list on the right is one kanban lane. A board has two kinds of lane: a fixed status (New, Rejected, or Approved) and any number of custom In Progress lanes in between. The rules the app itself enforces here:
A board needs at least two lanes.
The first lane must always be of type New, and the last lane must always be of type Approved.
You can add as many In Progress lanes as your workflow needs, and rename any lane's label — the default template ships with New, In Progress, Rejected, and Published (status Approved), but the labels are yours to change.
A board can't be deleted while it still has active term requests attached to it.
2. Requesting a New Term
There are two places to request a term: from a Glossary, or from the Editor while translating. Both roads lead to the same board — this section only covers the Request-vs-Publish choice that's specific to the Terminology Board; for the full field-by-field walkthrough of the add-term form itself, see How to add new concepts to glossaries.
2.1 From a Glossary
Open a glossary and click Add Concept. Every glossary also has its own Terminology Flow toggle next to that button — more on what it does in section 4 below.
After filling in the term, you get a choice at the bottom of the form:
Publish adds the term straight to the glossary — no review.
Request sends it to the Terminology Board instead, landing in the board's New lane for someone with approval permission to review.
2.2 From the Editor
Select a word in the source text of a segment — this only works on the source side, not the target — to open the glossary popover, then click Add term to expand the form. Fill in the term, part of speech, term type, and which glossaries it should save to, then choose:
Publish Term — same as Publish above, added directly to the glossary.
Request Approval — same as Request above, sent to the Terminology Board.
Whichever entry point is used, only a user with permission to add terms sees the popover or the Request option at all — if you don't see it, ask your Account_Admin to check your role's Terminology Board permissions.
3. Working the Board
Every requested term lands on the board under Context > Glossaries, on the Board tab. Each card is one request for one concept: it shows the concept's language and the languages requested, the glossary, and the request type (New term, Update or Removal).
Click a card to expand it in place and see every term of the request with its language. Click Add term to add another term to the same request, in a new language or in a language the card already has:
From here you can:
Move a request between lanes: drag its card into another lane, or use Move card on the expanded card. To move one term only, open the ⋯ menu next to it and choose a lane under Move this term to. To move several cards at once, tick their checkboxes (or choose Select All from the lane's ⋯ menu), click Move to…, pick the target lane and click Move.
Approve or reject: moving a card into the final Approved/Published lane publishes its terms to the glossary; moving it into Rejected discards the request. Only users with the matching approve/reject permission can complete those specific moves.
Check the review history: click a term to open Edit term. Its Review History shows who moved the term between lanes and what changed, and when.
3.1 Synonyms: several terms in one language
A concept can hold more than one term in the same language. These are synonyms: for the English term "cart", a Brazilian Portuguese glossary can hold both "carrinho" and "cesta". The board handles each synonym as a term of its own. It identifies a term by its language and its text, and ignores letter case and spaces at the start or end, so "Cesta" and "cesta" are the same term.
Request a concept with synonyms. In Add Concept, add one row per term. Two rows can use the same language as long as their text differs; a request that repeats the same text in the same language is refused.
Add a synonym to a card. Expand the card, click Add term, choose a language the card already has and type the new text, then click Save term. If the card already holds that text in that language, wxrks refuses it with A term with this text already exists in this language.
Change or remove one synonym of a published concept. Open the glossary, click the ⋯ (Concept actions) menu on the concept's row and choose Request Update. Every term of the concept appears on its own row, synonyms included. Then:
Tick only the synonym you want to change.
Set its Request Type to Update or Removal. For an update, edit the term's fields below.
Click Request (1). The number counts the terms you ticked.
The request remembers which synonym you ticked, even if someone later edits its text on the card.
What approving publishes. When the card reaches the Approved/Published lane, each term acts on one glossary term only:
Request type | What wxrks does in the glossary |
New term | Adds the term as another synonym. If the concept already has a term with the same text in that language, wxrks updates that term instead of adding a duplicate. |
Update | Changes only the synonym the request points at. The other terms in that language stay as they are. |
Removal | Deletes only the synonym the request points at. |
For example, the concept "cart" holds "carrinho" and "cesta" in Brazilian Portuguese. A request removes "cesta" and adds "carrinho de compras". After approval, the concept holds "carrinho" and "carrinho de compras": "carrinho" is untouched.
If the glossary has required fields, the check before approval looks at the term the request will publish, not at another synonym in the same language. See How to make glossary term fields required.
3.2 Importing terms to the board
To propose many terms at once:
Open the glossary and click ⋯ (More actions).
Choose Import to Board and pick an
.xlsxfile. wxrks shows Terms import completed when the requests are on the board.
The file uses the same layout as a glossary import (see How to Format Your XLSX File for Glossary Import). To give a concept several terms in one language, repeat that language's column block in the row.
Each term in the file becomes a request on the board, matched the same way a glossary import matches it:
On a row whose Concept ID belongs to the glossary, a term whose Term ID matches an existing term becomes an Update of that term.
Without a matching Term ID, a term whose text and language match an existing term of the concept also becomes an Update of that term.
Any other term becomes a New term, so approving it adds a synonym instead of overwriting the term already in that language.
A row without a known Concept ID becomes a request for a new concept.
4. Disabling a Glossary from the Board
The Terminology Flow toggle on each glossary's page (shown in section 2.1 above) controls whether that specific glossary takes part in the Terminology Board at all.
Turning it off for a glossary:
Blocks new term requests and term-update requests for that glossary.
Blocks importing terms into the board via XLSX for that glossary — see How to Format Your XLSX File for Glossary Import for the file format itself.
Puts that glossary's existing terms on the board on hold — they stay visible but locked, and can't be moved or updated.
If a single board card links terms from more than one glossary, disabling just one of them doesn't block the others: wxrks splits that card into independent cards so the still-active glossaries keep moving through the board normally, while only the disabled glossary's term stays locked.
5. Syncing Approved Terms with Phrase
If your team also uses Phrase for terminology, wxrks can push approved terms to a Phrase term base automatically. Go to Integrations > Phrase to set it up.
The integration has two parts, on two tabs:
Configs — where you connect wxrks to your Phrase account, using either a Phrase API access token or your Phrase credentials directly.
Configuration Group — where you link a specific wxrks glossary to a specific Phrase term base, by pairing a wxrks Glossary ID with a Phrase Term Base ID under one of your saved Configs.
Once a Configuration Group is set up, terminology approved in wxrks syncs to the matching Phrase term base for your current projects. This is a one-way push from wxrks to Phrase, not a two-way sync.
Related Articles