Glossary

This article gives definitions for the terms that are specific to LanguageWire Project 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 Project API with live data in production. 👉 Learn how to get a registered account here.
Authentication	The process to validate a user's identity to access an app or server.
Authentication flow	The Authentication (or Basic) flow is an option for apps that have web-server logic that enables back-end communication with the IdP (OneLogin). This flow results in a traditional OAuth access token being returned in secret to the web application via calls made on the back end. In this flow, rather than transmit the user details, the provider sends a special, one-time-use code that can be exchanged by the back-end web service for an OAuth access token. This exchange needs to include the client id and client secret in addition to the code, just like a traditional OAuth 2.0 flow.
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).
API Call	The API call is simply the process of sending a request to your API after setting up the right endpoints. Upon receiving your information, it is processed, and you receive feedback. As an example, websites and mobile apps perform API calls to fetch user data.
API Endpoint	An API endpoint is a digital location where an API receives requests about a specific resource on its server. In APIs, an endpoint is typically a uniform resource locator (URL) that provides the location of a resource on the server.
API Integration	In simple terms, API integration connects two or more applications to exchange data between them and connect to the outside world.
API Request	This is the same as an API call.

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 user must send this token in the authorization header when making requests with our API.

C

Name	Description
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
Client ID	The client_id is a public identifier for apps, and is automatically generated by the system when creating a new app 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 generate it from our Dashboard.
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 used as in-band signaling to cause impacts other than expansion of symbol to content. Avoid using them for files names, titles, etc.
Cron job	The cron utility is used for running scripts and commands at regular intervals, and at specific times and dates. It provides a very useful way to schedule tasks on your server. This is one of the use cases our Project API can easily cover.

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 a method for requesting information from a particular website using HyperText Transfer Protocol (HTTP). We use this method to retrieve data from LanguageWire Platform.

H

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

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 convention for the name of the files that are added to the translation project. See the table with the full list of allowed characters here.

J

Name	Description
Joda-time	Joda-Time provides a quality replacement for the Java date and time classes and is the standard used for date and time formats in our Project API. The design allows for multiple calendar systems, while still providing a simple API. Supporting classes include time zone, duration, format and parsing. This is the standardised format: YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM:SS
JSON	JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) is a lightweight data-interchange format based on a subset of JavaScript programming language standards. It is a format that is completely agnostic to languages and uses conventions that are familiar to programmers of C-family languages. Is the format we use for our API calls.

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 mil of 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.

O

Name

Description

Offset

This is a value that is usually included in pagination of contents and that we use to retrieve data from our API. This is applicable to all GET requests. 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.

P

Name	Description
Pagination	Pagination turns big archives of data into smaller, more digestible pieces. When we use a GET API request to get information from a server via API endpoint, there could be thousands of entries in the returned JSON file. The API response sending us thousands of entries at once is a drain of resources and a waste of our time. We want to search through a database a little bit at a time, and paging helps us query databases efficiently. In our API we use the pagination offset method, that uses limit and offset values.
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.
Polling	This refers to the continuous checking you can perform by calling a GET method periodically to see what state the sent project is in, usually to see whether it is a draft, is active, finished or cancelled. This action returns an informative message with the status of the project.
Preview	This is a function that lets our experts to see the reference files you have added to your project. This way, they can check how the original source content looks embedded into the overall layout, while working on your translations.
Project file	Those files that you would like to upload to your translation project, to get them translated into a specific language.

R

Name	Description
Rate limit	A rate limit is the maximum number of calls you are 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.
Reference file	Those extra items that you can include in your project as a reference for translators. These are presented in a preview screen to our experts while working on your materials. Example: HTML in case of a website, images, PDFs, etc.

S

Name	Description
Sandbox	This is the testing environment we provide to our users to play around with dummy data that has been already created in our system. To have a sandbox access to our Project API you need to generate a Token and a secret via the Dashboard.
Source language	A language which is to be translated into another language.When creating your translation project, you will need to specify the language in which your file is originally written.

T

Name	Description
Target language	A language into which another language is to be translated.You should specify this parameter when adding files to your translation project.
Template	LanguageWire Platform allows Project Managers to set some project templates that have pre-configured data and can be used by our users for their projects. Details such as: job types, reference materials, workareas,services, etc, can be pre-configured in a project template. This has been proved to be an effective feature for time saving and quicker deliveries. If you use a sandbox account, a project template is defined by default.
Terminology	A Terminology comprises a set of Translation Memories 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.
Token	This is a temporal 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 temporal tokens for either a sandbox 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 been previously translated, in order to aid human translators. Our system 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 (the "target"). The translation memory stores the source text and its corresponding translation in language pairs called translation units (TUs). This is useful for our experts and can be enabled from our Platform directly in the Entity (Company) account, or directly in the Project Template. 👉This information is registered and handle by our Project Managers, so if there are changes in your TM you should contact your assigned Project Manager.
Translation Memory Set (Cascading TMs)	Translation Memory Sets (or cascading TMs) is configuration of different TMs in a certain order so it can help to better translate your projects.

U

Name

Description

Universally unique identifier (UUIDv4 or GUID)

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. Information labeled with UUIDs by independent parties can therefore be later combined into a single database or transmitted on the same channel, with a negligible probability of duplication.This standard is the one recommended when creating your project, for your External ID.

V

Name	Description
Version	A version is a distinct variant of existing frontend 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.

W

Name	Description
Webhooks	A webhook is an HTTP-based callback function that allows lightweight, event-driven communication between 2 APIs. Webhooks put the responsibility of communication on the server, rather than the client. Instead of the client sending HTTP requests—asking for data until the server responds, the server sends the client a single HTTP POST request as soon as the data is available.
Workareas	These are all the specialisation fields available in our Platform, to which your translation project would fit, e.g. Sciences or Technology. You must specify this parameter, according to the nature of the content you want to get translated, so our experts in the matter can accurately work on them through the Platform.

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