Getting started

About five minutes from a fresh browser tab to a golden translation you can download.

The workspace scripts the important part for you, and this guide follows the same three beats: translate something → approve it → translate it again. That third step is the one that shows you what you are actually buying, so do not skip it.

Before you begin

You need two things:

An email address (or a Google account).
Something to translate.

No payment card — new workspaces start on a free trial, and TrueIdiom only asks for a card once that trial ends.

Note: To deter abuse we limit how many trials one network address can open; sign-ups past that limit still get a workspace, just without the trial characters.

Head to Sign in. You will see the options your deployment has enabled:

Create account — pick a workspace name, give an email address, and choose a password. Passwords must be at least 12 characters, must not be one of a blocklist of predictable choices (password1234, qwertyuiop12 and friends), and must not simply repeat the first part of your email address.
Continue with Google — sign in with a Google account. Your first sign-in creates the workspace, unless a colleague on your Google Workspace domain has already created one by signing in with Google — then you join theirs if that workspace lets people from its domain join automatically, and are asked for an invite link if it does not.

Either way, you end up in a workspace — a private tenant that holds your jobs, terminology, translation memory, and golden files. Everything you translate stays scoped to it; no other workspace can see your content.

Signing in later takes nothing but your email and password, or the same Google account. If that email and password open more than one workspace, TrueIdiom asks which one you meant — after your password has been checked, never before. A Google account that belongs to several workspaces gets the same choice, followed by a second pass through Google’s account picker. The one exception is an address registered in a great many workspaces: if sign-in asks for your workspace ID, open Sign in with a workspace ID under the password field and enter it.

Note: A Google sign-in on its own never opens an account that was created with an email and password at the same address — it creates a separate workspace, and the password keeps opening the original. An invite link, or your Google Workspace domain’s own workspace, can lead a Google sign-in to such an account. For a Gmail address or a Google Workspace account, Google then takes the account over: its password, any pending reset link, its authenticator and its recovery codes are removed, every session is signed out, and from then on you sign in with Google. For any other address that sign-in is refused, and the account keeps signing in with its password.

If your workspace requires multi-factor authentication, sign-in walks you through it there and then: scan the QR code with an authenticator app (or copy the setup key), enter the six-digit code, and save the one-time recovery codes it shows you once. A brand-new personal workspace does not require MFA until an administrator turns it on under Security, so most first runs skip this entirely. Completed Google sign-ins are exempt unless the workspace deliberately opts them in — the identity provider has already enforced its own factor policy.

2. What the free trial covers

New workspaces are granted 150,000 source characters — about 25,000 words — to spend over 14 days, counted from the moment the workspace is created (a language pair involving Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Thai or a Devanagari script draws them down at the dense-script weight). No card, no Checkout, no trial-expiry email chasing you. While the trial is live you land straight in the workspace; TrueIdiom only routes you to billing once the trial ends, which happens either when the characters run out or when the clock does, whichever comes first. One caveat: to deter abuse we limit how many trials a single network address can open, so a sign-up past that limit still gets a working workspace — just without the trial characters.

The counter sits under the translate box and shows both halves — characters left and days left — so there is never a question about where you stand.

Two boundaries worth knowing up front:

The trial covers text translation from the workspace. Layout-preserving document jobs are not trial-covered — they need a subscription.
The trial is a workspace trial, not an API trial. A tenant API key on a trial workspace is refused until you subscribe.

Pricing after the trial is per source character — you pay for the text you submit, never for the review and refinement passes run behind it. The pricing & billing FAQ covers plans, top-ups, and exactly what counts.

3. Translate something

The workspace opens on the Review queue; the New translation pane is where the work starts. Paste or type your source text, or choose a file. Plain text, Markdown, HTML, CSV, JSON and XML are read as text; DOCX, XLSX and PDF go down the layout-preserving document path instead.

The configuration column beside the box is where you set the source and target language, whether the source is plain text or HTML, an optional minimum quality score, and tone or grammatical gender when the target language needs the hint. It is also where you upload a terminology library (CSV or TMX) or an existing translation memory (TMX), so your first job already knows your house terms. An upload applies to the source and target language picked there; a terminology CSV applies to every language pair only when you tick Apply a CSV to all language pairs — handy for a do-not-translate list — and the list of sets shows each one’s scope. A large translation-memory TMX imports in the background, and the box tells you when it finishes or fails.

Documents — DOCX, XLSX and PDF — are translated in place with their layout and formatting preserved. They run asynchronously: the job is queued, processed in the background, and can take a few minutes for anything substantial. Track it in the Documents pane, which lists every document job with its status, languages and format.

Caution: Note that document jobs are not covered by the free trial — your first document needs a subscription, so start with text if you are still trialling.

Whatever you submit, the same loop runs before a human ever sees it:

Translate — a baseline translation of your source.
Reflect — the draft is re-read and assessed MQM-style (issues by severity and category, not one opaque score), and when it falls short the weak spots are repaired.
Verify — a repaired candidate is checked again before anything is published or queued for you.

You are not billed for any of that. The reflect and verify passes are not metered at all — you pay for the source characters you submit and nothing else. The FAQ lists what is not metered in full.

4. Review and approve it

When the loop finishes, a job that clears your quality bar is published on its own, straight to its golden record (step 6). Anything below the bar lands in your Review queue with the status awaiting_review: the machine work is done and the job is waiting on a person. Nothing below your bar becomes final without a human decision — that is the point.

Open the job to see the source, the baseline translation and the refined candidate side by side, along with the quality assessment. You decide what ships: publish the candidate as-is, edit it first and publish your own version, save a draft to come back to, or reject the run outright.

Document jobs get the same decision, one segment at a time: the Review button in the Documents pane opens a drawer that walks you through the translated segments — with an option to show only the flagged ones — and ends in Approve document.

5. Translate it again

This is the step people skip, and it is the whole product. Publishing a translation — your approval, or the quality gate’s when a job clears your bar — writes it into your workspace’s translation memory. Only published work goes in — a draft still waiting for review teaches it nothing, which is why “just translate it twice” shows you nothing unless the first run is published in between.

So submit the same source text again. An exact match comes straight back from your memory: instantly, verbatim, with no translation work behind it at all. During the free trial, the onboarding card above the New translation box tracks all three beats and ticks this last one off when it fires.

Every approval you make from here compounds. That is also the honest answer to “why not just call a translation API myself?” — the memory is yours, it only ever learns from published work, never from drafts, and it keeps its value when you subscribe.

6. Download the golden file

A published job — approved by you, or cleared by your quality bar on its own — is your golden record: the version of the translation your team can rely on. From the job page, download it as DOCX or PDF in one click; the same endpoint also serves plain text for scripting. Translated documents are downloaded from the Documents pane in their original format, layout intact, as soon as the job is translated.

Workspaces can route golden files and documents into their own Azure storage account — see Bring your own storage.

7. Invite your team

Reviewing is a team sport. An administrator can mint an invite link from the Security pane: choose the role — Member or Administrator — optionally bind the invite to a single email address so only that person can redeem it, set how many days it stays valid, and give it a label so you remember who it was for.

Caution: The link is shown once, at the moment it is created, so copy it before you close the panel.

Whoever opens it joins your existing workspace — with an email and password of their own, or with Continue with Google — and never picks a workspace name, because they are joining yours. A link bound to an email address works only for that address, whichever way they sign in. Apart from Google Workspace domain auto-join (above), an invite is the only way in: the optional workspace ID on the sign-in page only chooses among workspaces an account already belongs to. Pending invites are listed underneath with their expiry, and can be revoked at any time.

8. Keep an eye on usage

Administrators get a Usage & billing pane in the workspace. It reports billable characters against your monthly allowance and the percentage consumed, a daily chart, a table of billable characters and metered jobs by billing period, and a CSV export for any billing month. While the free trial is running, the counter under the translate box is the number to watch instead.

Characters are the unit your allowance and top-ups are measured in — the pricing & billing FAQ explains where each number comes from, and how top-ups work once a monthly allowance runs out.

What's next

Bring your own storage — keep golden files and translated documents in your own Azure account.
Pricing & billing FAQ — what a character is, what is never metered, and how top-ups work.
API quickstart — the same loop in four curl calls, once you are ready to automate it.