Smart Terms for Confluence: an easy way to organize CJK glossaries

Hedi Chouayakh

June 25, 2025

“Hello” doesn’t always look like hello.
It could be こんにちは, 안녕하세요, or 你好, and if your team operates across Asia, you’re seeing all of them in your Confluence pages.

But can your Confluence Glossary keep up?

Global companies require more effective ways to manage knowledge and collaborate across languages and cultures. Confluence is already one of the most powerful platforms for organizing information, building company knowledge bases, and improving teamwork.

However, for companies operating across Asia and using logographic languages like Chinese, Japanese, and Korean (CJK), maintaining consistent terminology becomes particularly challenging.
That’s where Smart Terms for Confluence comes in. It refines glossary management, solves multilingual search challenges, and makes Confluence an even stronger tool for global businesses.
On the other hand, if inconsistent terms, buried multilingual content, and frustrating search experiences are slowing down your global teams, you need to discover how Smart Terms transforms your Confluence into a unified, searchable knowledge hub across all CJK languages.

Why do global companies choose Confluence?

Confluence is used by thousands of teams worldwide for one reason: it simplifies knowledge sharing.

With Confluence, you get:

• Centralized documentation for everything from project plans to technical guides.
• Real-time collaboration with comments, inline feedback, and document version history.
• Powerful search features to find what you need quickly.
• Global accessibility from any location or device.

It’s flexible, powerful, and customizable. However, global teams often face one persistent problem: maintaining multilingual consistency.

Confluence: the foundation for global collaboration

For multinational teams operating across East Asia, Confluence provides essential infrastructure through space management and robust integrations.

Its knowledge management core acts as a centralized repository, while collaboration tools, such as real-time editing and commenting, are available.
In addition, documentation templates maintain terminology consistency, and global accessibility ensures 24/7 availability across time zones.
But while Confluence lays a solid foundation for collaboration, one critical piece remains complex for multinational teams: managing terminology across languages.
Without a structured, multilingual glossary, even the most organized Confluence spaces can fall into confusion, especially when dealing with East Asian languages like Japanese, Korean, or Chinese.

However, without a structured glossary in Coufluence, this can cause:

• Misunderstandings between teams
• Inconsistent terminology in customer communication
• Wasted time searching for the right content

Why do multilingual glossaries matter for multinational enterprises?

Unified knowledge across borders

Companies operating in China, Japan, Korea, and beyond often face the challenge of maintaining consistent terminology across different languages and scripts. A term like “User Guide” may appear in Confluence as 用户指南 (Chinese), ユーザーガイド (Japanese), or 사용자 가이드 (Korean).

Smart Terms for Confluence ensures that these variants are centralized, searchable, and properly indexed.

Enhancing knowledge retrieval

When employees search for terms within a glossary, the indexing system matters. Poor indexing of logographic languages leads to inefficiencies, misunderstandings, and inconsistent usage. Smart Terms addresses this by introducing intelligent, language-aware indexing, which enables smoother access to information.

New feature spotlight:

Smart Terms for Confluence: logographic language indexing (Chinese, Japanese, Korean) support

Smart Terms for Confluence now includes advanced indexing:

• Simplified Chinese (简体中文): Indexed using Pinyin transliteration. Terms like “学生 (xuésheng)” are automatically sorted under “X,” while “苹果 (píngguǒ)” falls under “P.”
• Traditional Chinese (繁體中文): Organized by stroke count, allowing terms like 第一章 to be found systematically based on character structure.
• Japanese (日本語): Sorted using Gojūuon order based on Hiragana/Katakana. If a term is Kanji-only (e.g., 学生), Smart Terms defaults to Chinese rules unless Hiragana is appended in brackets, such as 学生 (がくせい).
• Korean (한국어): Indexing follows the initial consonant rule based on Hangul structure. For example, 가 (ᄀ) is filed under “ᄀ” (Giyeok), 나 (ᄂ) under “ᄂ” (Nieun).

Page definitions macro & custom indexing

In addition to multilingual indexing, Smart Terms introduces the Page Definitions macro. This feature scans a Confluence page and displays all highlightable glossary terms used within it, complete with their definitions. This provides readers with instant context, helps new team members learn company terminology more quickly, and ensures that no important definition goes unnoticed during reviews. Additionally, when exporting to a PDF file, you can view all the terms within the exported page.

For greater flexibility, Smart Terms for Confluence provides custom indexing. If automated language detection encounters mixed scripts or rare characters, users can manually assign the correct index letter to ensure every term is perfectly organized.

Glossary re-indexing: update pre-existing glossaries

Need to apply the new intelligent indexing to an existing glossary?
Smart Terms for Confluence supports bulk re-indexing. Here is how you can do this:

1. Export the existing space glossary.
2. Re-import it into the same space with “Update existing terms” enabled.
3. Preserve attached images or files by disabling “Reset existing terms media.”
   This allows legacy glossaries to be upgraded to the new, powerful indexing rules without losing valuable assets.

Use case: a global software company operating in APAC

Company: A global software company with HQ in the US, R&D in Seoul, customer support in Tokyo, and marketing in Shanghai. All teams collaborate via a centralized Confluence knowledge base in their native languages, but apparently it’s not enough!

Challenge: Inconsistent glossary terms caused confusion and slowed workflows. Japanese support agents were unable to locate key Korean or Chinese documents.

Solution: Smart Terms for Confluence:

• Shanghai Marketing: Used Pinyin-based sorting.
• Tokyo Support: Adopted Gojūuon indexing.
• Seoul R&D: Implemented Hangul consonant rules.

Result: The entire multilingual glossary became interlinked, instantly searchable across all teams, and correctly indexed for each CJK script. Confusion dropped, and finding critical information became easier.

Try Smart Terms for Confluence today and empower your global teams!