Terminology

Consistency matters in translation: a key term like LORD or covenant should be rendered the same way everywhere. Aquilla’s terminology system helps your team agree on preferred renderings and keep to them.

Reach it from your project’s sidebar (Terminology), or from Project Settings → AI & completion → Terminology Library → Open Terminology Library. Both land on the same surface; it opens inside the workspace rather than as a separate page, so your file stays loaded behind it.

Termbases and concepts

A termbase is a project’s dictionary of concepts: the meanings you care about (for example “God’s covenant” or “forgiveness”).
Each concept records its preferred rendering in your target language, along with definition and related concepts.
Renderings belong to a lane. On a project with several target languages, the glossary, the live checks, the AI draft prompts, and exports all show the renderings for the lane you have open, and an edit changes only that lane’s renderings. Switch lanes to see or edit another language’s renderings; nothing you save in one lane removes another’s.

Rendering status

A concept can list more than one target rendering, and each one carries a status that says how it should be treated. The status shows as a small word next to the rendering (for example “grace·required”):

Shown as	Meaning
required	The rendering to reach for: what Aquilla nudges you toward.
alternate	An acceptable alternative; allowed without a nudge.
forbidden	This rendering should not be used; flagged as a violation.

A concept itself also has a lifecycle: active, draft, or deprecated. Only active concepts are compiled into the checks you see while translating; draft and deprecated concepts sit in the termbase, unenforced.

How enforcement feels while translating

Terminology in Aquilla is advisory by design, guiding without blocking:

As you type, Aquilla checks your text against the active concepts in the termbase, live.
Every issue (a missed required rendering or a used forbidden one) shows as a single inline underline under the term itself: amber for a missed required rendering, red for a forbidden one. A small violet T marks it as a terminology check, so you can tell it apart from Aquilla’s other built-in checks. Hover the underline for the rule name and what’s wrong: it’s a nudge, not a wall, and you can still override it when the context calls for something different.
A forbidden rendering is treated more firmly: it also shows up grouped by concept in the Terminology page’s Violations view, and feeds into the project’s violations inbox and the cell’s colour marker like any other check.
The source text gets its own highlight: any word or phrase, including a multi-word term like “Holy Spirit,” that matches a concept in your termbase is marked. Click it to open a popup listing every accepted rendering and its status, with a Go to Terminology page button for the concept’s full detail.

Adding a term while translating

Select source text and choose Add to terminology from the selection toolbar to draft a new concept without leaving the editor. (From the Terminology page itself, a plainer Add term button opens a dialog with just a source term and rendering, without the matching options below.)

Contributors can use Add term on the Terminology page too. Below your organization’s terminology floor the dialog says “Saved as a suggestion for review. Suggestions are not checked against translations until someone with termbase permission approves them.” and the term lands in the suggested group until someone with that permission approves it. At or above the floor, the term starts active. Below Contributor (a viewer or commenter), Add term is disabled.

The Add to terminology popover shows a live count of how many places in the open file match as you type (“Matches {count} places in this file”), plus matching related forms of a word below the rendering field. Its Approve now (enforce this term) checkbox controls whether the term starts checking translations right away or waits for review, and it’s unchecked, and disabled, for anyone below your organization’s terminology floor:

Anyone with Contributor access or above can suggest a term this way, even below the role your organization requires to manage the termbase. Suggesting is the safer default.
Checked, Aquilla explains “This term will be checked against every translation right away”; unchecked, “Saved as a suggestion for review. Suggestions are not checked until approved.” Below the floor the popover says instead: “Saved as a suggestion — approving terms needs a higher role on this project.”
If you leave the rendering box empty while Approve now is checked, a hint reminds you a term with no rendering can’t check anything yet.

Editing, deleting, or archiving termbase entries, importing a termbase, and approving a suggested one, needs a minimum role that your organization sets, Project lead by default; below that role Aquilla blocks those actions, explains why, and names the role you need. An organization owner can change this floor from Org Settings → Terminology permissions, anywhere from Contributor (so translators can manage terms directly) up to Maintainer (the most restrictive option). If a save fails for another reason (you’re offline, a conflict, a server error), Aquilla shows the reason and keeps the dialog open so you can retry, instead of silently discarding what you typed.

A term doesn’t have to match one exact string. Type a wildcard in the source term field (“Use * for endings that change, e.g. grac*”), and Aquilla finds every form of the word already used in your source text, whether you’re adding the term from the editor or refining it later from its detail page.

Discovered forms show as a row of chips, one per distinct form found, each labelled with how many times it occurs. Click a chip’s remove icon to exclude that form from matching; click an excluded chip again to bring it back. Aquilla scans the file you have open when you add a term, and every loaded cell once you’re refining forms from the term’s detail page.
Matching options, a small checkbox group next to the forms, fine-tune the match further: Ignore vowel marks and accents (shown only when the term itself carries one), Allow prefixes and suffixes (only shown once your project has an affix inventory, described next; otherwise a Set up prefixes and suffixes for this project link takes you there), and Match case (matching ignores case by default, so Word and word count the same).
On a concept’s own detail page, a Forms section repeats the same chips and options, scoped to that one term, plus a text field to add a form Aquilla didn’t discover on its own (Another spelling of this term…).

Setting up a project’s prefixes and suffixes

Some languages glue letters onto a word, such as Hebrew’s inseparable ו/ה/ב/כ/ל/מ/ש prefixes or Turkish’s chained suffixes. Telling Aquilla about them lets Allow prefixes and suffixes recognize an affixed form as the same term. Configure this once per project from Project Settings → AI & completion → Terminology → Prefixes and suffixes:

Load preset fills in a starting list for Hebrew, Arabic, Swahili, or Turkish; edit the Prefixes and Suffixes lists afterward (type and press Enter to add one, or remove a pill).
Max chained per side caps how many affixes can stack on one word (default 2).
Ignore vowel marks and accents by default sets the project-wide starting point for that option on every term.

Editing renderings from a term’s detail page

Open a concept from the Terminology page to reach its detail view, where you can add, remove, and change the status of its renderings without leaving the page: click Add next to Add rendering… to add one (it starts alternate, never required, so a new rendering can’t silently demote the team’s agreed term), click an existing rendering to cycle its status (required → alternate → forbidden → required), or use its remove control to delete it. This needs the same role your organization requires to manage the termbase (see above); below that role the detail page’s term fields are read-only.

Fixing a flagged translation is a separate, lower bar: from the occurrence list at the bottom of a term’s detail page, anyone who could edit that cell in the editor (Contributor access or above) can correct its target text right there and see the verdict update, even without the role your project needs to edit the termbase itself.

Each row in that list is labeled with the cell’s reference, such as RUT 2:1, with the file it lives in below. A cell with no reference reads “Untitled cell”. Click a row’s go-to button to open the cell in the editor.

Experimental: when Bible data enrichments is on (see Search and reference), a concept’s detail page has a Bible person, place or group section. Choose Link to a Bible person, place or group, pick a book, and search or pick from Best matches. The section then reads “Linked to” and the entry’s name, with Change and Unlink. Voices and Who’s Who use the entry’s preferred rendering as the name. A TBX export carries the link, and a TBX import reads it back.

Cleaning up duplicate concepts

Once a termbase has two or more concepts, a Merge duplicates button appears above the list. Pick two or more concepts to combine, in the order you want the survivor first, and choose Preview merge: Aquilla shows the survivor, its combined renderings and notes, and which concepts will be removed. Confirm merge applies it, keeping the survivor’s id and rewriting every occurrence to point at it.

Terminology can be imported and exported in standard formats: TBX (the industry terminology-exchange standard) and CSV, so you can round-trip your termbase with other translation tools. A TBX export carries the renderings of the lane you have open, not every lane’s. See Exporting your work.

The Terminology page’s Import button reads CSV, TSV, TBX, and LIFT (.lift), the lexicon format FLEx (SIL FieldWorks) writes from File → Export → Lexicon (LIFT 0.13 XML). Aquilla decides the format from the file’s contents first and its name second, so a renamed file still imports. If a file yields no terms, you see “Import failed” instead of a silent success.

A FLEx lexicon documents the local language, but a termbase runs from the language you translate from. So Aquilla turns the entries around:

In the LIFT file	In Aquilla
The gloss (or definition), in the analysis language	The source term
The headword (citation form)	The preferred rendering
Variant forms	Alternate renderings
The sense definition	The concept’s notes

Entries whose senses share a gloss merge into one concept with every headword as a rendering. When a file has glosses in several languages, Aquilla uses the most common one. LIFT range files, audio and picture references, and FLEx’s other export formats are not read.

Importing a CSV doesn’t require an exact column layout: Aquilla recognizes many common header names for the source term (Source Term, Headword, Key Term, and others), the rendering, and its status, whatever order they come in and whatever delimiter separates them. A CSV with no header row at all still imports, read as source, rendering, status, and notes in that order.