Languages

Your application, in your customer's language.

You type your captions the way you always did. One button fills the translations — on your Mac, offline — and what a human translated, the machine never touches again. That one rule is the whole system.

The translation editor: one row per text, the English you wrote in the middle column and the German translation on the right, each with a mark saying whether the machine or a person wrote it
One row per text, your own words in the middle, the translation on the right — and a mark in front of each saying who wrote it.
Nothing to do until you want it

A single-language application needs no command, no files, no ceremony. The base language is a project setting — “this application is written in German” — and it only says what you type. Every text stays exactly where you wrote it.

The translations live with the table

Every table's branch in the navigator ends with a Translations entry: every text of that module, one column per language, typeable in place. The list is enumerated from your forms, reports and menus — you never maintain it, and it is never stale.

The Mac fills, you outrank it

Fill translates what is empty or out of date — and says how many before you press it. Machine work carries a ✨ and may be redone; the moment you type over an entry it is yours, and no machine fill touches it again. Change a base text later and your translation is not silently replaced — it turns yellow and asks.

Scripts mark their sentences

In code, only you know which string is for a person's eyes. language.text("Saved!") is the mark — the string itself is the base language, no invented keys — and placeholders travel with the translation: language.text("Invoice {number} saved", …). A translation that loses a placeholder is reported before it ships.

The build ticks, the app follows the Mac

One checkbox per language in the build — with an honest footer: “12 of 480 entries missing — the base text shows there.” A built application follows the Mac in front of its user, within the ticked languages; a missing translation shows your base text, never a blank.

Neuridion's own windows come translated

The backup window, the standard dialogs, the find and export editors and every error message a person can be shown speak nine languages out of the box — English, German, French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Dutch, Polish, Turkish — and follow the same choice your texts do. Your customer's data is never translated: it belongs to the person who typed it.

Two machines translate, and both stay on your Mac

Apple’s translation is quick and knows nothing about your windows. Apple Intelligence is told where every text stands — that this word is the title of a button on an invoice window — and that is the whole difference between machine translation that reads like software and machine translation that reads like a machine. Neither needs a network, an account or a key. A hosted model joins the menu if you have one set up, and the entry says out loud that your texts are sent to it.

The Fill menu open with three entries: Apple Translation — fast, no context; Apple Intelligence — knows where each text stands, stays on this Mac; Anthropic — your texts are sent there
Three ways to fill, and the menu says which one leaves your Mac.
A module with every entry translated and nothing left to do
What finished looks like: nothing to fill, nothing to review. The count beside a module is the honest measure — and a language that came back entirely unchanged is refused whole rather than counted as done.

Measured on twelve real captions out of the example project, English into German:

Where the context wins

A save button: sparen → Speichern. A column over orderNumber: Anordnung → Bestellung. A caption Credit limit: Kreditlinie → Kreditlimit. Single words and captions are exactly where a context-blind translator guesses wrong.

Where it does not

Whole sentences: the on-device model shortens them, and Apple’s translation keeps them. Neither replaces the other, so both stay on the menu — and this is written here rather than quietly left out, because a comparison that only shows its winner is an advertisement.

What it costs

2.7 against 3.7 seconds for the twelve — the on-device model is not the slow option. Nothing is sent anywhere on either road, so there is no key to buy, no account to make and nothing to explain to your customer’s data protection officer.

A script’s sentences, marked in one command

In code only you know which string a person will read — "city" in a query is not a sentence. Right-click → Mark Sentences for Translation, and every text at a place that is read — an alert, a field’s complaint, a label you write into — gets its language.text(…), in a single edit that a single undo takes back. A text built with + is handed back to you, one clickable line per place: it needs placeholder names, and a machine inventing {a} and {b} would make the translation worse than the English it replaced.

The to-do list showing sentences that are shown to a person but not marked for translation, each with the file and line and the hint to wrap it in language.text
And what is still unmarked stands in the to-do list, with the line it is on — a sentence that never travels is otherwise the quietest bug there is.

The result

The same module in French: every caption, button and report line translated, with the placeholder Page {page} sur {pages} intact
The same module in French — and the placeholders came through: Page {page} sur {pages}.

The long form — the editor, the states, the exact rules — is a chapter of its own in the manual.