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.

Source project : A project whose source text is shared by one or more linked target projects. See Source projects & linked targets.

Linked target : A project that imports its source text from a source project, and sees a stale-source marker when that source changes.

Organization (org) : The scope for billing and for granting roles across multiple projects; 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 — 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. Rises 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. 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. Can be 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. 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. Releases 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.

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 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.

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.