Rules

Rules are centralized language guidelines that define how content is written for a specific content group and locale. They keep tone, terminology, formatting, and wording consistent across projects and teams.

Rules are the single source of truth for language guidelines. Create rules directly, or upload a style guide and extract rules from it. Either way, Phrase reads from the rules, not the style guide itself, when translating content and running quality checks.

How Rules Fit into the Platform

Phrase matches everything by content group and locale. A project belongs to one content group, for example, Marketing or Legal, and each job carries a locale, for example en-US or de-DE. When an AI capability runs on a job, Phrase gathers all rules for that content group and locale and applies them automatically.

Create Rules

There are two ways to create rules:

From a Style Guide

Upload a style guide as a Markdown (.MD) file to extract a set of rules from it. Extracted rules take the style guide's content group and locale. The style guide is only the starting point: once rules are extracted, Phrase works from the rules.

Manually

Create rules directly, without a style guide, and choose which content groups and locales they apply to. This method suits guidelines that live outside any style guide.

A manual rule can hold up to 450 characters.

AI capabilities, such as AI Translation Agent and MT Optimize, automatically use rules to improve results: adapting tone and formality, applying required wording, and following locale conventions. Using rules does not add any AI Unit (AIU) cost.

Reuse Rules Across Content Groups and Locales

Rules extracted from a style guide belong to that style guide's locale and content group. Uploading a new version replaces the linked rules with a freshly extracted set. Rules added, edited, or reassigned manually remain unaffected, and previous style guide versions stay accessible.

Manually created rules are independent from style guides and can apply to more than one content group and more than one locale. To apply a rule everywhere, assign it to all content groups and all locales. This reuses a guideline instead of recreating it for every combination.

For example, universal tone-of-voice rules apply to every content group, plus a few legal-only rules apply to the Legal Content Group. When a legal job runs in French, both sets apply.

Work with Rules

Rule changes take effect immediately for jobs already running in that content group. Make changes only when no jobs for that content group are active, and check rules before starting new jobs.

Deleting a content group deletes any rule linked only to that group. A rule linked to several groups keeps the rule and only loses the link to the deleted group.

How Rules Connect to AI Checks

Rules are also the foundation of automated quality checks. Phrase creates one AI check from each eligible rule, a one-to-one mapping. AI checks cannot be created from scratch; every check comes from a rule. Where an AI check cannot be created from a rule, Phrase skips the check and shows the reason.

Because checks come from rules, managing rules manages checks: disabling a rule disables its check, and deleting a rule deletes its check.

A quality profile is the full set of checks, QA checks and AI checks, for one content group. It matches a content group one-to-one, and Phrase assigns it automatically.

Limits