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. 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 on projects with more than one target language. 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; more endorsements mean lower decay. (Spreading an endorsement to other cells with similar source text is planned, but not yet live.) See Decay markers.

Decay : A per-cell “needs attention” signal, showing how far a cell is from its required number of validations (decay = 1 − endorsements ÷ required); a decay marker appears once decay crosses the warning threshold (0.66). 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.

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. An attribution, not a role: it grants no permissions by itself. 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. See Autopilot.

Back-translation : An AI translation of your target text back into the source language, used to check that meaning carried across.

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.