What really sets Smart Terms Apart is its precision and customization. Instead of relying on automatic guesses or generic suggestions, every definition, highlight rule, and translation is intentional and admin-controlled. It doesn’t try to infer meaning it enforces the correct one. Smart Terms gives teams the power to define terms once and apply them consistently everywhere, with complete flexibility over how they appear, who sees them, and how they behave on Confluence pages.

From fine-grained highlight rules to space-level overrides, multilingual glossaries, logographic indexing, and rich definition pop-ups with media, Smart Terms is built for organizations that want reliability and customization, not shortcuts.

Highlighting Engine & Customization

Smart Terms’ highlight engine is highly flexible. You can fine-tune exactly how and where terms are highlighted:

• Auto-highlight or manual: Choose to automatically mark all terms when a page loads, or not. A toggle button on each page lets users turn highlights on or off (If disabled by space/global settings).

• Visual style: Pick your highlight colors and style, set the background color, text color, and underline/bold/italic style.
  You can even add custom CSS for special styling.

• Hover vs click: Control interaction by enabling “highlight on hover” or forcing users to click a word to see definitions. (We’ve seen product teams disable hover so users must click, while support teams keep hover on.)

• First vs all occurrences: Choose whether to highlight only the first occurrence of a term per page, or every occurrence. This avoids overwhelming pages with repeated highlights if desired.

• Substring & sensitivity: Turn on/off substring matching (e.g. highlight “mar” inside “Smart”). Toggle case-sensitive and diacritics-sensitive matching to prevent unintended highlights (e.g. treating “API” differently from “api” or handling accented characters).

• Content targeting: Enable or disable highlighting in specific parts of pages, headings, page titles, links, code blocks, and even blog posts can all be individually toggled.

When you hover or click a highlighted term, a definition pop-up appears with all details (term title, definition text, media, related terms, etc.). If a term has multiple definitions (e.g. an acronym vs. a full phrase), users can slide between them in the pop-up. Related terms or synonyms flash briefly to draw attention, helping users explore your custom glossary easily.

Smart Terms supports space-level and user-level rules. Admins can disable highlighting globally or for specific glossaries.

Likewise, each space can override settings: in one real-world example, an “Accounting” space simply turned off all highlighting, while a “Product” space enabled highlighting with a yellow, bold style and disabled hover. Individual users can even disable Smart Terms on their profile if they prefer. This per-space/user flexibility means you can highlight terms differently for each team without affecting others.

Multi-Language & Logographic Support

Smart Terms is built for global teams. You define terms in a default language, then add translations as needed. You can create a new term and immediately choose multiple languages, or add translations later via the term editor. Bulk import of multi-language terms from Excel is also supported for fast setup.

When highlighting, Smart Terms can mark up all translations at once or just the user’s language. For example, if your Confluence pages have content in English and German, you can highlight both English and German terms for a mixed audience.
Or you can choose “only user language” mode: a German user will see only German-term highlights, while an English user sees only English terms.
This is ideal when different groups share pages (e.g. an external audience of mixed nationalities sees all translations, or a multicultural team each sees terms in their own language).

Smart Terms even handles logographic languages (Chinese, Japanese, Korean). It applies language-specific indexing so those terms sort sensibly in glossaries.
For instance, Japanese terms are indexed by gojūon order, Chinese by character stroke count or Pinyin, and Korean by the initial Hangul consonant.
If the app misdetects a language, you can manually fix the index letters. This support means you can build a truly multi-language glossary in Confluence – even for CJK (Chinese/Japanese/Korean) text without hassle.

In addition to translations, Smart Terms supports alternate terms and meanings. Each term can have multiple definitions, synonyms, or related terms. For example, the term Item might have two meanings (“Incident” vs “Ticket” in one example) that users can toggle between.
Related terms link together as a “vocabulary,” so clicking one can flash others. You can attach images, videos, or diagrams to any term, too. In short, Smart Terms becomes your central terminology library: a terminology management for Confluence that covers all languages and complexities.

Use Cases and Benefits

Smart Terms helps teams maintain a single, unified vocabulary across the company while still allowing each department to manage its own terminology. A global glossary can hold the official definitions everyone agrees on, while teams like Product, Support, or Marketing keep space-level glossaries for internal jargon. This setup gives every group the flexibility they need without losing a shared source of truth, maintaining communication clean, and avoiding conflicting definitions.

Highlighted terms also make documentation easier to understand. When someone reads a Confluence page, they can hover over or click a term to instantly see its definition, synonyms, related terms, and even rich media. This reduces confusion during everyday reading and helps new hires settle in faster by allowing them to immediately grasp the meaning of acronyms and technical phrases without leaving the page.

Because every team works differently, Smart Terms adapts to each documentation style. Support teams can use hover highlights with a blue underline and strict case sensitivity, while Product teams prefer bold yellow highlights on click. Accounting might disable highlights entirely. This flexibility ensures each department presents terminology in a way that fits its workflow and audience, all without affecting other spaces.

Centralizing terminology also reduces redundant work. When a team updates a term, whether the meaning shifts, a new synonym is added, or an acronym needs clarification, the change is automatically applied everywhere. Teams no longer lose time re-explaining definitions or correcting misunderstandings. Everyone stays aligned with less back-and-forth, fewer errors, and far more consistency across documents.

Smart Terms also supports multilingual documentation, which is especially helpful for international teams or client-facing spaces. Terms can be translated into multiple languages and highlighted based on the reader’s preferences, or highlighted in all available languages at once. This makes joint work across regions far smoother by removing language barriers and ensuring everyone understands terminology in their own language.

In environments where documentation is central, like engineering wikis, support knowledge bases, product manuals, and onboarding guides, Smart Terms enhances how teams consume information. Readers get definitions right in the flow of the page, authors avoid cluttering documents with extra explanations, and admins maintain terminology centrally. By combining rich definitions, customizable highlighting, and multilingual support, Smart Terms turns Confluence into a clearer, more aligned workspace where terminology confusion disappears.

中国  |  日本  |  한국

“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!