Translation aids

Dialecto’s aids share one stance: they propose, you decide. No aid writes a translation, stages a change, or opens a pull request on its own — everything an aid produces goes through the same staging, review, and pull-request flow as a hand-typed translation.

Machine-translation suggestions

In the editor, a suggestion is drafted for the entry you’re on and grounded in your curated context — domain, usage, brand voice, glossary, translation memory. You review it, edit it or take it, and save through the normal staging path.

Suggestions run local-first: the default adapter is a local Ollama server, so your strings don’t leave the machine the app runs on. Which model that server hosts is your choice — Dialecto is model-agnostic and doesn’t claim “best translation”; it makes sure whatever model you run sees the right context. Self-hosted installs point the adapter at their own Ollama instance (see Self-hosting).

Autofill: the `translation_mode` setting

Per repo, you choose how far machine translation is allowed to go:

suggest (the default) — aids only ever propose in the editor; nothing is filled in for you.
autofill_submit — untranslated strings are filled with machine-translation drafts as staged changes submitted for review; a human reviews and approves each one before anything ships.
autofill_approve — drafts are staged and auto-approved, ready for batching into a pull request. The PR itself — and your GitHub review of it — is still the gate.

A companion switch, auto-translate on scan (off by default), runs your chosen autofill mode automatically when a scan lands new untranslated strings.

Translation memory

Dialecto remembers what your team has translated. When an identical or matching source string comes up again, the past translation is offered — the same button label isn’t re-translated in every domain.

Glossary

Your organization’s glossary defines the terms that must stay consistent — “Workspace” must never become “Arbeitsbereich”. Glossary terms are:

suggested while translating, next to the entry;
checked during validation — a translation that contradicts a glossary term is flagged before it ships;
managed at the organization level, so every repo shares one vocabulary.

Where the boundaries are