Glossary

The words Aquilla uses, in plain language. Terms link to the page where they’re explained in full.

Core building blocks

Cell : The atomic translation unit: one paired piece of source and target text (a verse, a heading, a footnote). Cells are what you edit. See Editing cells.

File : A unit of content within a project, typically one book or document section. Made up of cells and broken into sections (a chapter, for scripture). See Files, cells & navigation.

Project : The top-level container for a translation effort: it holds files, members, settings, and quality signals. See Creating a project.

Lane : An independent target-language track within one project, Aquilla’s word for each language you’re translating into; the default lane is the project’s primary target language, and you add more in Settings → General → Languages. A lane you no longer need can be archived rather than deleted, its cell data kept and restorable later. An archived lane does not count as an active language in the org overview. See Files, cells & navigation.

Default lane : The first target language set up for a project, its primary lane, present from creation. Health, progress, and the sidebar’s section progress bars reflect the default lane on a multi-language project; per-language numbers live in each project’s Languages table. See Project health.

Lane switcher : The editor-header control that switches which lane you’re reading and writing, shown even on a one-lane project to maintainers and to members limited to certain languages. Each lane’s translations, validation, and progress are independent. See Files, cells & navigation.

Source project : A project that provides source text. If you’re adding another target language to a project, add it as a lane rather than a second project: linked target projects are reserved for translation chains, where one project’s translations become the source for another. See Source projects & linked targets.

Linked target : A project that imports its source text from a source project (including, in a translation chain, from another project’s translations) and sees a stale-source marker when that source changes.

Door43 (DCS) : The door43.org Content Service, a public library of Bible translation resources (from unfoldingWord and others) that a project can import as its source. A Door43-linked source stays pinned to the release you imported, with source editing locked until a maintainer pulls an update or detaches the link. See Source projects & linked targets.

Organization (org) : The scope for billing and for granting roles across multiple projects; it contains projects and members. See Organizations & members.

Quality & review

Validation : A reviewer’s explicit confirmation that a cell is correct. A project can require more than one validator per cell. See Validation & reviewer queue.

Endorsement : A validation counted toward a cell’s required-validation target. A cell with all the endorsements it needs counts as validated, and validated cells lend health to other cells with similar source text in the same file. See Decay markers.

Decay : A per-cell “needs attention” signal, showing how far a translated cell is from work a human has already validated: validated cells have none, and cells with similar text near them have less. A decay marker appears once decay crosses the warning threshold (0.66 by default). Decay measures whether something has been reviewed, not whether it’s correct.

Health / Health Ring : The project-wide roll-up of decay, shown as a circular gauge (health = 1 − average decay), rising as cells get validated. See Project health.

Hidden cell : A cell parked with Hide cell. Translators do not see it, and it is left out of progress, health, exports, and search. Nothing is deleted, and Show cell brings it back. Project lead and above only. See Hiding a cell.

Built-in check : A predefined test that flags likely problems (empty translation, identical to source, placeholder or number integrity, and so on). See Built-in checks.

Violation : An issue flagged by a check: it appears in the violations inbox and as a coloured marker on the cell (red for major, amber for minor), tracked separately from decay/health.

Comment : A threaded discussion attached to a cell, for conversation, not sign-off. See Comments.

Terminology

Termbase : A project’s dictionary of concepts and their preferred renderings, project-scoped or shared org-wide. See Terminology.

Concept : A meaning tracked in a termbase (e.g. “covenant”), with one or more target renderings. A concept’s lifecycle is active, draft, or deprecated; only active concepts are enforced.

Rendering status : How a concept’s target rendering is treated: preferred, admitted, or forbidden. See Terminology.

Collaboration & sync

Role : A member’s permission level on a project: viewer, commenter, reviewer, contributor, project lead, maintainer, or owner. A reviewer’s or contributor’s grant can be narrowed further by a scope. See Roles & permissions.

Scope : A per-member restriction limiting a reviewer or contributor to specific target languages and/or files. No scope means full access to everything the role allows; project leads and above are always unscoped. See Roles & permissions.

Project Manager : A member marked as accountable for a project, shown on its Overview page and searchable and sortable in the org project table. Naming someone also adds them as a Project lead on that project. See Roles & permissions.

Invite : A shareable link that adds someone to a project with a chosen role. See Inviting people.

Focus lock : The short-lived, soft lock your editor claims on the cell you’re in, so others see you’re editing it, releasing on blur, idle, or disconnect. See Real-time sync & presence.

Presence : The live indication of who is editing which cell right now.

Outbox : The queue in your browser that holds edits locally and sends them to the server when sync is healthy, so a network drop doesn’t lose work. See Editing cells.

Continuous sync : Aquilla’s model of saving: no manual save, commit, or publish. Edits become durable records as you move on from a cell.

AI & audio

AI copilot : The built-in assistant that drafts translations and back-translates, drawing on your project’s knowledge. See The AI copilot.

Autopilot : An assistant that reads a whole passage, or a whole project, and stages draft translations ahead of you, in cells you haven’t reached yet, distinct from the copilot’s one-cell-at-a-time drafting.

Back-translation : A literal reading of your target text back into the source language, used to check that meaning carried across. Aquilla offers three: an AI reading, a non-AI statistical gloss built from your project’s own translated pairs, and word-level alignment between the two. See Back-translation.

Voice Studio : Where a project manages its cast of text-to-speech voices and voice cloning. Each voice is backed by OmniVoice (hosted, no key needed), Gemini TTS (your own key, server-side), or a local in-browser model (MMS or Kokoro). See Audio & voices.

TTS / ASR : TTS (text-to-speech) reads cells aloud; ASR (automatic speech recognition) transcribes recordings into text. ASR runs in your browser, as do the local TTS voices; the Gemini TTS voices run on a server.

Automation

Agent : Aquilla’s in-app AI assistant, scoped to a project. It proposes drafts, staged imports, and memory/brief updates for a human to review and apply; it never edits or commits on its own. See Using the AI agent.

Agent memory : Durable, agent-authored notes about a project’s conventions (glossary, style, observations), reviewed and approved by a person before they count. See Agent memory & the project brief.

Project brief : The single ground-truth document every agent run reads before acting, the highest-oversight tier of agent memory, editable directly only by a Project lead or above. See Agent memory & the project brief.

Changeset : A staged, reviewable batch of agent-proposed changes (for example a bulk import) with a status (Pending review / Approved / Committed / Discarded), approved or rejected only from the approval page. See Approving agent changes.

API token : A personal access token (aqk_…) that lets an external agent or script act on your behalf via the Agent API, in Ask (writes need approval) or Act (writes apply immediately, Maintainer+ only) mode. See Approving agent changes.

Migration & export

Migration : The one-way, continuous import of a Codex/GitLab project into Aquilla, after which Aquilla is the source of truth. See Migrating from Codex.

Stale-source marker : A flag on a target cell indicating the source text behind it has changed since the target was last edited.

Export : Getting your work out: translations as USFM, text, Markdown, CSV/TSV, XLIFF, TMX, WebVTT, or an audio-by-character ZIP, and terminology as TBX/CSV. See Exporting your work.