A do-not-translate list is the set of strings in a document that must come out of translation unchanged: party names, defined terms, statutory and case citations, standard designations, product and model identifiers, and currency and unit symbols. It is not a glossary. A glossary decides how a term is translated; a do-not-translate list asserts that it is not translated at all — which makes it language-independent, so one list governs every target language at once. It prevents the most dangerous class of error in legal translation, because a translated party name or a localised statute reference reads perfectly fluently and is still wrong.
This guide covers what belongs on the list, who owns it, what to do when a frozen string lands in a sentence that wants to inflect it, and how to prove enforcement actually happened rather than assuming it did.
The Six Categories That Cover Most Legal Documents
Party and entity names. Orient Holdings B.V., General Provisions Ltd — names built from common nouns are the ones engines translate. Legal-form suffixes (GmbH, S.à r.l., LLC) must never be converted to a local equivalent, because the equivalent does not exist in law.
Defined terms. Anything capitalised and defined in the agreement itself: Affiliate, Material Adverse Effect, Permitted Encumbrance.
Statutory and case citations. s. 172 Companies Act 2006, 17 CFR § 240.10b-5, Donoghue v Stevenson [1932] AC 562. The v is part of the citation, not a preposition to be rendered. Procedural references under the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure behave the same way.
Standard and specification designations. EN ISO 13849-1, ASTM D638, IEEE 802.11.
Product, model and code designations. SKUs, drug brand names, deal code names, ISINs, ticker symbols.
Currency and unit symbols with their values. US$1,000,000, £, bps, sq ft. Never converted, never re-denominated.
Why This Is Not Just a Glossary With Blank Targets
A glossary entry is a mapping — one source term, one required target term, per language pair. Maintaining it means maintaining a matrix: twelve languages means twelve decisions per term, each needing someone who reads that language.
A do-not-translate entry is an assertion of identity. The target is the source. No linguistic judgement is required to create it, which means a paralegal or a deal team can build a usable list in an afternoon without waiting on reviewers in twelve jurisdictions. That asymmetry is why DNT lists scale where glossaries stall.
The failure signatures differ too. A glossary error produces the wrong word, which a reviewer skimming for meaning will often catch. A DNT error produces a plausible foreign-language noun where a company name used to be, and reviewers read straight past it because nothing looks broken. Both belong in the same terminology control layer, but they are enforced by different rules and tested differently.
Ownership Sits With the Matter, Not the Vendor
The list is a legal artefact, so it belongs to the people accountable for the document. In practice ownership splits three ways. A firm-level or company-level list holds durable entries: your own entity names, subsidiaries, product marks, standing counterparties. A client or account layer holds that client's names, brands and preferred conventions. A matter or transaction layer holds this document's defined terms and code names.
Each entry needs a named owner, a date, and a one-line reason. "Because the client said so in an email dated 3 June" is a perfectly good reason and vastly better than an unattributed row. Without provenance, nobody will ever delete anything, and the list silently accumulates entries that are wrong for the current matter.
Translation vendors should consume the list, not author it. A vendor-authored DNT list is a set of guesses about which strings matter legally — and the vendor is not the party signing the document.
Frozen Strings in Case-Marked and Right-to-Left Languages
This is where DNT gets genuinely difficult. A frozen string keeps its characters, but the sentence around it still has grammar. German wants a genitive on des Orient Holdings B.V.; Polish and Russian want case endings; Finnish attaches suffixes with a colon, as in Orient Holdings B.V.:n; Japanese needs a particle after the string.
There are two defensible policies and one bad one. The bad one is letting the engine inflect inside the frozen string, which corrupts the name. The workable policies are: keep the string absolutely fixed and let a carrier noun absorb the grammar (the company Orient Holdings B.V.), or freeze the stem and permit a language-specific attached suffix declared explicitly in the entry. Choose per language, record the choice, and never leave it implicit.
Right-to-left targets add a rendering problem rather than a grammatical one: a Latin-script frozen string inside Arabic or Hebrew text has to be positioned by the Unicode bidirectional algorithm, and a pipeline that mishandles it will place trailing punctuation on the wrong side of the name.
Scope Rules Stop a List From Doing Damage
A DNT entry without scope rules is a blunt instrument. Four rules prevent collateral damage.
Case sensitivity. Company as a defined term must be frozen; company as ordinary prose must not. If the platform matches case-insensitively, every generic use of the word survives untranslated and the output reads like a ransom note.
Whole-token matching. An entry for Charter should not fire inside charterparty. Substring matching is the most common cause of DNT-induced nonsense.
Longest match wins. Where Board and Board of Directors both appear, the longer entry takes precedence deterministically, not by import order.
Section scope. Exhibit and schedule labels are often frozen in the operative agreement and translated in a summary memo prepared from it. Same string, different instruction, different document.
Entries also need an expiry review, because a code name frozen during a live deal usually should not stay frozen in the post-closing translation of the executed contract files.
Where Matching Breaks at the File Level
A do-not-translate rule can be perfectly specified and still miss, because the string it is looking for does not exist as a contiguous run of text in the file. In Office Open XML, a Word paragraph is a sequence of runs, and a spell-check marker, a tracked-changes remnant, a bookmark boundary or a stray formatting change can split Orient into two runs mid-word. Naive string matching over run text then fails, and the name gets translated.
Scanned PDFs fail differently: OCR breaks a name across a line and inserts a hyphen that was never in the source. Text boxes and tables fail again, because their content sits outside the main text flow.
The check is simple. Run your DNT test document through the pipeline in the file format you actually use, with tracked changes and comments present, and confirm the enforcement report shows the term found and held. Bluente applies do-not-translate rules against the document's structured content, in the same pass that keeps clause numbering, tables and footnotes intact across 120+ languages and 22+ file types.
A Four-Test Acceptance Check
Build one test document — a page is enough — and put all of this in it.
A party name made of common nouns, used in a genitive or possessive construction, translated into German or Polish.
A statute and a case citation, and check that the engine has not substituted a local equivalent statute. Silent jurisdiction substitution is the error that gets a memo withdrawn.
A currency symbol next to a value, plus a unit, and confirm neither has been converted.
A defined term that is also an ordinary word, appearing in both senses in the same paragraph, to test case sensitivity and whole-token matching.
Then ask for the enforcement report and check it lists each frozen string, its location, and whether the rule fired. A platform that cannot tell you which entries fired cannot be audited by the person who signs the translation off, which is the point of the exercise. Practitioners comparing engines on exactly this behaviour trade notes in this r/TranslationStudies discussion of machine-translation output quality.
Keeping the List Alive After the First Matter
A DNT list decays in one direction: it grows. Entries added for one transaction stay forever, and eventually something frozen for a 2024 deal starts appearing untranslated in unrelated 2026 documents.
Three habits keep it honest. Review any entry that has not fired in twelve months — either the matching is broken or the entry is obsolete, and both are worth knowing. Store entries with structure rather than as a flat text field, so status and provenance survive; ISO 30042 term bases carry both, and DNT entries can live in the same base as glossary entries with a distinct status. And promote entries deliberately: matter-level entries stay with the matter unless somebody decides they are firm-wide, a discipline covered in more depth in the guide to per-matter glossaries.
Sources and Further Reading
Federal Rules of Civil Procedure — citation forms for procedural references
Unicode Bidirectional Algorithm (UAX #9) — how Latin strings render inside RTL text
ECMA-376 Office Open XML — the run model that splits words inside Word files
ISO 30042 (TBX) — structured term entries with status and provenance
r/TranslationStudies on machine-translation output quality — working translators describing the terminology errors that survive fluent output
Related Reading
Last reviewed 24 August 2026 by the Bluente document engineering team, who build and test the pipeline described here. We update these guides when the underlying standards, regulations or file formats change.
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