Glossary

This article gives definitions for the terms that are specific to LanguageWire MT API and generic terms and definitions used in our documentation.

A

Name	Description
Account	An account is a single register held by an user in the LanguageWire Platform. You should have an authenticated account with your company details to use our MT API with live data in production. 👉 Learn how to get a registered account here.
Artificial Intelligence	This is an AI technique to teach programs behavior by using extensive training data from past examples of similar behavior. We teach programs to translate from one language into another and call these programs neural machine translation (NMT) models.
Authentication	The process to validate a user's identity to access an app or server.
API Call	The API call is simply the process of sending a request to the API after setting up the right endpoints. Upon receiving the request, it is processed, and you receive a response.
API Endpoint	An endpoint is the end of a communication channel. When APIs interact with other systems, each touchpoint of interaction is considered an endpoint. For example, an API endpoint could include a server, a service, or a database where a resource lives. API endpoints specify where resources live and who can access them.
API Integration	In simple terms, API integration connects two or more applications to exchange data between them and connect to the outside world.
API Keys	An API key is a unique identifier that enables other software to authenticate a user, developer, or API calling software to an API to ensure that this person or software is who it says it is. API keys authenticate the API instead of a user and offer a certain degree of security to API calls.
API Request	APIs are everywhere and are part of every aspect of the web. An API request happens when a developer adds an endpoint to a URL and uses that endpoint to call the server or the database.

B

Name	Description
BCP 47	An IETF BCP 47 language tag is a standardised code that is used to identify human languages in the Internet. The tag structure has been standardised by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) in Best Current Practice (BCP) 47. Some examples: The code "en" stands for English; - The code "es-419" for Latin American Spanish; - The code "rm-sursilv" for Romansh Sursilvan; - The code "sr-Cyrl" for Serbian written in Cyrillic script; etc. We use these codes to identify the languages that are available in our Platform.
Bearer token	Bearer authentication (also called token authentication) is an HTTP authentication scheme that involves security tokens called bearer tokens. The bearer token is a string, generated by the OIDC/OAuth2 server that is visible to users from the LanguageWire Dashboard. The client must send this token in the Authorization header when sending requests to our API.

C

Name	Description
Callback	A “callback” is a POST request sent from MT API to a client’s Callback URL when an event they have already subscribed for occurs.
Client ID	The client_id is a public identifier for OAuth applications, and is automatically generated by the system when creating a new application from our Dashboard.
Client Secret	The client_secret is a secret known only to the application and the authorization server. It is essential the application’s own password. You can rotate it from our Dashboard.
Client credentials	Client credentials is a flow of OAuth2 used to authenticate the client application without authenticating the actual user. It is used typically for machine-to-machine or server-to-server communications. Find the full description in OAuth 2.0 RFC 6749, section 4.4.
Control character	Control characters are characters that don’t represent printable character yet rather serves to start particular action. Control characters are utilized to execute any action, in contrast, to print printable character on display. They are also utilized as in-band signaling to cause impacts other than expansion of symbol to content. Avoid using them for files names, titles, etc.

D

Name	Description
Developer Portal	Developer portals are interfaces that bridge the gap between API providers and API consumers. It's called a developer portal because most of the API consumers are developers. Developer portals aim at educating developers on how to use APIs and provide all the information users need to leverage APIs.

E

Name	Description
Error code	The numbered code that points to the reason of failure of a specific API call method.

G

Name	Description
GET Method	GET refers to an HTTP method. It is generally used to retrieve data from a web server.

H

Name	Description
HTTP Methods	POST, GET, PUT, PATCH, and DELETE (or "methods" as formally called) are the most common HTTP verbs/actions. In other words, they represent Create, Read, Update, and Delete (or CRUD) operations within a web serevr.

I

Name

Description

ISO/IEC 8859-1

This is according to the standard, the default encoding of documents delivered via HTTP and defined the repertoire of characters allowed in HTML documents. Each character is encoded as a single eight-bit code value. These code values can be used in almost any data interchange system to communicate in most languages. In our API we use this standard for the name of the files that need to be attached to the translation project.

J

Name	Description
JSON	JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) is a lightweight data-interchange format based on a subset of JavaScript programming language standards. JSON has the advantage that it is both easy for humans to read and write and for machines to parse and generate. It is a format that is completely agnostic to languages and uses conventions that are familiar to programmers of C-family languages.
JWT	JSON Web Token (JWT) is an open standard (RFC 7519) that defines a compact and self-contained way for securely transmitting information between parties as a JSON object. This information can be verified and trusted because it is digitally signed. JWTs can be signed using a secret (with the HMAC algorithm) or a public/private key pair using RSA or ECDSA. They are commonly used for authentication and information exchange in web applications, allowing for stateless communication where the server does not need to store session information.

M

Name	Description
Machine Translation	MT is a computer system that transforms a sequence of characters into a different one that is recognizable to a human being, as text in another language, with relevant clues about the information in the original text. LanguageWire Machine Translation uses Neural systems and the computer algorithm is based on a large set of bilingual data (typically we need 5-10 million words to train a good enough Machine Translation engine). The MT is usually used as interactive system, where human translator receives suggestions from the MT system while she-he is translating text in a CAT Tool.
Machine Learning	This is an AI technique to teach programs behavior by using extensive training data from past examples of similar behavior. We teach programs to translate from one language into another and call these programs neural machine translation (NMT) models.

N

Name	Description
Natural Language Processing (NLP)	This is a subfield of linguistics, computer science, and artificial intelligence concerned with the interactions between computers and human language, in particular how to program computers to process and analyse large amounts of natural language data. The goal is a computer capable of "understanding" the content of documents, including the contextual nuances of the language within them. The technology can then accurately extract information and insights contained in the documents as well as categorize and organize the documents themselves.
Neural networks	This is exactly the technology behind our MT API. This is a very precise system that takes the right terms for the users based on translation memories but also based on the learning done from training data. During the training phase, the NMT system tries to set the parameter weights of the neural network based on the reference values (source-target translation). Hence, words appearing in similar context will get similar word vectors. The result is a neural network which can process source segments and transfer them into target segments. During translation, NMT is looking for a complete sentence, not just chunks (phrases) or isolated words. Thanks to the neural approach, this is not about translating words but about transferring information and context, which returns in top level quality standards on your translations.

O

Name	Description
Offset	This is a value that is usually included in pagination of content and that we use to retrieve data from our API. Offset is the position in the dataset of a particular record. By specifying offset, you retrieve a subset of records starting with the offset value. Offset normally works with length, which determines how many records to retrieve starting from the offset.
OAuth 2.0 protocol	Clients use OAuth 2.0 flows to obtain ID tokens, which work with web apps. OAuth 2.0 also means that you have a single protocol for authentication and authorization (obtaining access tokens).

P

Name	Description
Parameters	Parameters are special types of variables used in computer programming to pass information between procedures and functions. An argument to a function is referred to as a parameter. Adding three numbers, for example, may require three parameters.

R

Name	Description
Rate limit	A rate limit is the maximum number of calls a client is allowed in a particular time interval. Rate limits help us to manage the network traffic for our API and for specific operations within our API.

S

Name	Description
Segment	This is a block of text, generally (and ideally) representing a single sentence. A segment represents the atomic unit for translations.
Source language	A language which is to be translated into another language. When sending a translation request, you will need to specify the language in which language your content (text/document) is originally written.
Synchronous APIS	With synchronous APIs, the expectation is that data will be returned immediately. An API is usually synchronous when data or service availability, resources and connectivity are high and low latency is a requirement. In case of our MT API, the response to /translate text is also synchronous, hence if the source text is longer, it will take longer to receive a response.

T

Name	Description
Target language	A language into which another language is to be translated. You should specify this parameter when sending translation requests.
Terminology	A Terminology comprises a set of Translation Memories and the Termbase related to a specific domain or industry, or a specific product or customer. A Terminology can be linked to more than one entity (company) in the LanguageWire Platform.
Throttling	This is the process of limiting the number of API requests a user can make in a certain period.
Token	This is a temporary credential that is used to access protected resources. This is used in place of a password when performing operations over HTTPS on the command line or the API. In this case, you can generate your temporary tokens for either a trial or production account, from our Dashboard. 👉 Learn how to get your tokens here.
Translation Memory (TM)	Translation Memory (TM) is a database that stores segments, which can be sentences, paragraphs, or sentence-like units (headings, titles or elements in a list) that have previously been translated, in order to aid human translators. It automatically searches and reuses those words. Each entry, or segment, in the translation memory includes the original language, known as the "source" and its translation, known as the "target". The translation memory stores the source text and its corresponding translation in language pairs called translation units (TUs). This is useful for vendors and can be enabled from LanguageWire Platform directly in the company account. This is usually done by LanguageWire Project Managers.
Trial	This is the free account we provide to our users to play around with our API. To have a trial access to our MT API you need to generate a secret and a token via the Dashboard.

U

Name

Description

Universally unique identifier (UUIDv4)

This is a 128-bit label used for information. When generated according to the standard methods, UUIDs are, for practical purposes, unique. Anyone can create a UUID and use it to identify something with near certainty that the identifier does not duplicate one that has already been, or will be, created to identify something else. This standard is the one recommended when assigning a name to the to-be translated document.

V

Name	Description
Version	A version is a distinct variant of existing API that differs in shape or behavior from the original. Versions give customers a choice of sticking with the original API or upgrading to a new version at the time of their choosing. Versions are a mechanism for releasing breaking changes without impacting API consumers.

X

Name	Description
XML tag	The Extensible Markup Language tags form the foundation of XML. They define the scope of an element in XML. They can also be used to insert comments, declare settings required for parsing the environment, and to insert special instructions. Translating text with XML tags is possible with our MT API. See more details in the text management guide.

Something missing? If you have any other related term that is not listed here, and you would like us to include, please contact us.