Let’s imagine you are a librarian ordering books for your library. You have books in different languages, genres, and formats. Some are leather-bound manuscripts, others are softcovers. For each book, you know details like:

  • Language

  • Genre

  • Number of pages

  • Binding type

  • Publishing year

  • Author and title

  • Price and currency

These details are metadata information that describes something.

How you use metadata depends on your goal:

  • If you want to showcase valuable books, you look at publishing year, price, and finish.

  • If you want to organize for different nationalities, you group by language, then genre, then author or title.

  • If you want to separate reference books from fiction, you use genre.

Now, apply the same logic to translation projects. Metadata could mean language codes, billing information, customer product lines, or other customer fields. For example:

  • If your customer calls a project “IT”, but in your system you call it “Software Localization”, BeLazy can automatically translate that value into the right term. This is called value mapping.

  • If a project description includes “Transcreation”, BeLazy can trigger your transcreation workflow even if the customer labels it “Translation”. This is an exception rule.

With exception-based configuration, you decide what metadata matters most. You set conditions like “if the job name contains France and currency is Euro”, and then define what BeLazy should do, like “apply the Euro price list for the French subsidiary”.

Because different systems use different terms such as “client”, “end customer”, “deadline”, “due date”, BeLazy standardizes them into basic values so they appear consistently across connectors. Still, some connectors include extra data (like product lines) that others don’t. You can see these differences in the documentation: Project Extradata.

BeLazy is flexible, but not every page allows exceptions. As a workaround, you can create two connections with different configurations and use auto-approval to filter which projects to accept. If you need advanced customization, contact the BeLazy team, we’re happy to help.

Key notes:

  • Metadata: descriptive information about projects

  • Value mapping: aligning customer terms with your internal terms

  • Exceptions: rules that handle special cases
  • Basic vs. extra data: what’s standardized vs. what’s specific to a connector