Getting started

1. Create your workspace

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 someone at your Google Workspace domain has already created one — then you join theirs, subject to that workspace’s auto-join setting.

Either way, signing up creates your workspace — a private tenant that holds your jobs, terminology, translation memory, and golden files. Everything you translate stays scoped to it; nobody outside it can see your content.

Signing in later takes nothing but your email and password. If that address belongs to more than one workspace, TrueIdiom asks which one you meant — after your password has been checked, never before.

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. 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.

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. 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:

1. Translate — a baseline translation of your source.
2. Reflect — the draft is re-read and assessed MQM-style (issues by severity and category, not one opaque score), and the weak spots are repaired.
3. Verify — the refined candidate is checked again before it is 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, the job lands in your Review queue with the status awaiting_review: the machine work is done and the job is waiting on a person. Nothing 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. Approving a translation writes its segments into your workspace’s translation memory. Only approved segments go in — an unreviewed draft teaches it nothing, which is why “just translate it twice” shows you nothing unless you approve 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. The onboarding card on the dashboard 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 work a human signed off, and it keeps its value when you subscribe.

6. Download the golden file

Approving a job publishes it as a 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.

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.

The link is shown once, at the moment it is created, so copy it before you close the panel. Whoever opens it creates their own credentials and joins your existing workspace — they never pick a workspace name, because they are joining yours. 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 that reaches your invoice — the pricing & billing FAQ explains where each number comes from, and how top-ups work once a monthly allowance runs out.