Keep terms consistent

Goal: decide once how your key terms carry across languages — product names, UI actions, the words your domain depends on — and have kapi flag anything that drifts before it ships. The same terms store guides translation up front and validates it after. Concepts: Terminology; storage models: Memory & terms storage.

kapi keeps terms in a terms bundle (terms.json). To bring in a list your team already maintains elsewhere, import it across the boundary — a spreadsheet exported to CSV, for example:

glossary.csv

source	target	domain
password	mot de passe	security
log in	se connecter	ui
dashboard	tableau de bord	ui
settings	paramètres	ui

Desktop

The Terms view is where that list lives:

1. Import the list. Import the CSV into the project terms store; terms are listed by language pair and domain, ready to browse and search.
2. Spot-check a term. Look up an entry to confirm the approved target before a full pass.
3. Enforce it. With the terms store in the project, term findings surface in the Checks view, in the terminology gate of check --ship, and against each unit in the Review queue — the same drift, caught wherever you look.

Agent (Claude)

Ask for enforcement, or for curation:

Check the French files against our approved terms and fix what drifts.

The assistant looks up approved terms before it writes (kapi terms lookup), runs term-check after, and fixes flagged targets through the round-trip. It can also grow the list: candidate terms it spots (or kapi exec term-extract surfaces) land as kind:"term" change-set entries through kapi apply — written to the committed terms source the recipe binds with defaults.terms_source, for you to approve in git diff.

CLI

Import once into a named terms store, verify, then check deliveries:

kapi terms import glossary.csv --name product-terms \
  --format csv --header -s en -t fr                 # once; persists across sessions
kapi terms lookup "log in" --name product-terms -s en -t fr
kapi exec term-check messages_fr.json \
  --source-lang en --target-lang fr --terms product-terms

The term-check tool flags targets that don't use the approved equivalent for a source term — "code secret" where the terms store says "mot de passe" — and exits non-zero on violations, so it doubles as a CI gate. Scale with globs and -j 4; keep the terms store current with re-imports (concepts merge) and kapi terms export for vendor kits. Flags: kapi terms, kapi exec term-check.

In a project, the check resolves the project terms store and the recipe's languages automatically — no flags — and the terminology gate folds into kapi check --ship.

Try it

The in-browser build pre-seeds a terms store from the list above — inspect it, look up terms, then pseudo-translate and run term-check to see enforcement against a real backend:

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Next

• Reuse what you've translated — the terms store guiding translation, not just checking it.
• Memory & terms storage — the three places a terms store can live.
• Terminology — how discovery and enforcement work.