CSV formatting guidelines for glossaries

File structure

A CSV (Comma-Separated Values) file is a simple text file that contains one entry per line.
Each line represents a row in a table, and each value in that row is separated by a delimiter character.

Example:

en-US,it-IT
Hello,Ciao
Good morning,Buongiorno
Thank you,Grazie

The first line must contain the headers, which define the languages of your glossary (e.g. en-US, it-IT, fr-FR, de-DE).

Supported headers

Use ISO language codes with a hyphen (-), not an underscore (_):

en-US, it-IT, fr-FR, de-DE

Formatting rules

• Use commas (,) or semicolons (;) as column separators. Both are supported. Make sure you use the same separator consistently throughout the entire file — do not mix them.
• All rows must have the same number of columns — for example, if your header has 2 languages, every line must have 2 values.
  • If one translation is missing, leave the cell empty but keep the separator:
    Hello,
• If a value contains a comma, wrap the entire value in double quotes (" "):
  "12,5 km","12,5 km"
• If a value contains quotes, double them inside the field:
  "He said ""Hello""","Ha detto ""Ciao"""
• Avoid extra spaces before or after separators.
• Always save the file in UTF-8 encoding to preserve accented characters (é, è, ü, ñ, ç, etc.).

Common mistakes to avoid

File encoding and saving

When saving your CSV file, select CSV UTF-8 (Comma delimited) as the file format.
This ensures special characters and multilingual content are preserved correctly.

This article is about:

• what a CSV file is and how it's structured
• which header format is supported (e.g. en-US, it-IT, fr-FR)
• which column separators are supported (commas and semicolons)
• how to handle separators, quotes, and missing values
• common formatting mistakes that cause import errors
• how to save your file in UTF-8 encoding for a successful upload