The Terminology Board is wxrks' review workflow for new glossary terms: a kanban-style board where a requested term moves through lanes like New, Reviewed, 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, Reviewed (status 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 > Board tab.
Click a card to expand it in place and see every language pair requested for that concept, plus a + to add another language to the same request:
From here you can:
Move a term between lanes — drag its card into another lane, or select one or more cards with Select All and use Actions > Move Selected Requests to bulk-move them (useful when moving many terms between languages or stages at once).
Approve or reject — moving a card into the final Approved/Published lane publishes the term to its glossary; moving it into Rejected discards the request. Only users with the matching approve/reject permission can complete those specific moves.
wxrks also keeps a review history on each term — who changed its status, and when — visible from the term's edit view.
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