Roles & permissions

Every person on a project has a role that decides what they can do. Roles form a ladder — each rung includes the abilities of the ones below it.

The project roles

Role	Can…
Viewer	Read cells and comments. No editing.
Commenter	Everything a viewer can, plus comment on cells.
Reviewer	Validate cells (confirm they’re correct). No content edits.
Contributor	Edit cell content — the core translating role. Also records audio, writes back-translations, and waives check flags.
Project lead	Invite members, assign work, create and import files, and manage terminology.
Maintainer	Manage roles (change or remove members) and edit project settings — validation rules, AI provider, and the like.
Owner	Full control, including archiving and deleting the project.

Higher rungs include the lower ones — an owner can do everything a maintainer can, and so on. Exporting isn’t gated by role: anyone who can read a project can export what they see.

Operator access

Separate from these seven roles, the Aquilla team holds platform-operator access — used for things like running migrations and support. It’s controlled by an internal operator allowlist, sits outside the project role ladder, and isn’t something you assign within a project.

When someone has more than one grant

You might receive a role two ways at once — directly on a project, and also through a team grant. Aquilla resolves this with a simple rule:

The highest privilege wins.

So if you’re a contributor directly and a contributor via a team, you’re a contributor; if one path grants more than the other, you get the more powerful one. You don’t have to manage this — Aquilla shows you a single resolved role.