Business Documents Translation API

Your Content, Professionally Translated

The Lingo24 Business Documents API allows you to easily integrate into our translation platform to access a wide variety of translation services provided by our team of 4,000 professional, native-speaking translators.

Targeted at customers with large volumes of content, the Business Documents API enables the transfer of documents between our platform and your systems to enable an automated, streamlined workflow.

Blending machine translation with professional human translation, we have a range of service levels that enable you to target your translation spend based on the value of your content.

From fast reliable Budget Translation to multilingual copywriting and customised technology integration, each service level is tiered to allow you to target spend to appropriate content.

As our API utilises the Lingo24 translation platform, this means we are able to utilises a number of translation assets to help you manage cost and quality, such as translations memories or glossaries. As we use such assets, you will never pay us to translate the same content twice nor settle for a flat rate. This is why we price each job individually - so we can blend your quality expectations and translations assets to create a unique project.

Currently we support all major office or productivity file formats (e.g. Microsoft Office or OpenOffice formats), creative formats (e.g. IDML, FM) text formats (i.e. txt, csv, XML), localisation formats (e.g. po, properties, yaml, XLIFF) and technical formats (e.g. XML, DocBook).

Technical Overview

The API is designed around Representational State Transfer (REST) principles and allows clients to produce and access content using JSON (application/json) and/or XML (application/xml).

When interacting with the API, clients must specify which content type they will send using the Content-Type header. JSON is the default content type produced by the API. This can be overridden using the Accept header.

The API uses the OAuth Version 2 standard for authentication for all resources within the API. To be able to use the API you must sign-up for an account on our Developer Portal. Within this portal you can create a Client ID and Client Secret for each application that will access the API.

As the Lingo24 Business Translation API builds on our core translation platform, any projects created via the API gain access to your existing translation assets and our graded quality level workflows.

The base URL of the API is hosted at http://api.lingo24.com/docs/v1/.

API Specifics

Service Levels

The API supports the a range of translation service levels provided by Lingo24. These are programmatically available from the /services resource but are also provided below for your convience:

  • Professional Translation - Professional translation, with separate editing. Our most popular service level. Business documents where style isn't a priority, but accuracy and clarity are vital (e.g. general correspondence, technical documentation, legal documents etc).
  • First Draft - Fast, low cost, professional translation. A basic 'non business-critical' translation of the required text in the requested language (e.g. reviewing general business information, incoming business communications).
  • On-brand Translation -Professional, fully proofread translations which adhere to on-brand messaging. Documents that must respect corporate brand/style guidelines (e.g. sales/marketing material).

Translation Lifecycle

Interactions with the Lingo24 Business Translation API use REST resources that allow you to follow a typical translation lifecycle:

  • Create Project
    • Upload File(s)
    • Create Job(s)
  • Confirm or Amend Project
    • Receive Metrics for Job(s)
    • Optionally, Edit Project
    • Confirm Project
  • Receive Target Files
    • Download Target File(s)

Progression between stages is triggered and monitored by interacting with the resources within the REST API and using the status codes for projects and jobs.

To manage projects and jobs, upload files or view metrics, the client should use the standard REST pattern of GET, PUT, POST and DELETE commands against the resources of the same name.

As you build a project each job is analyzed and priced. At this stage both the file metrics and overall price are available, allowing the client to DELETE either individual jobs or the entire project.

Having reviewed the jobs in the project, a client can either choose to accept the project and start the translation (changing the project status to IN_PROGRESS) or save a quote for review (changing the project status to QUOTED).

A typical quote is valid for 15 days, although this will depend on individual terms and conditions. A quoted project can be accepted by changing the project status to IN_PROGRESS within that timeframe.

Changing the status of the project is achieved by using a PUT command. It should be noted that once a project is IN_PROGRESS, amendments and cancellations are subject to the standard Lingo24 terms and conditions.

At each stage of the lifecycle, we can trigger a callback or you can poll for updates until the job is complete. This is discussed in the Callback section within the key patterns page.

Status Codes

Each project and job goes through a series of statuses before delivery. At any time when you request the contents of either resources, it will be in one of the states outlined below.

Status codes are also used to allow clients to approve or cancel projects for translation as well as a store a quote for later use. For example, to accept a quote and start a project a PUT request is required to be sent to the Project resource changing the status of the existing project from QUOTED to IN_PROGRESS.

The following are the status codes associated with a Project:

  • CREATED - the project has been created in our system, ready for configuration. In this status you can manipulate jobs
  • PENDING - the project has been created in our system and is being analysed. If required we will also estimate and quote for any manual File Engineering or additional services required
  • QUOTED - this is an optional status. Updating a project to this status saves a quote in our system. In this status you cannot further manipulate the project. A typical quote is valid for 15 days, although this will depend on individual terms and conditions
  • IN_PROGRESS - a project will be in this status when it has been accepted by the client. Changing it to this status triggers Lingo24 to start work on your project
  • CANCELLED - this status is when a project has been cancelled by the client. Changing the project to this status tells Lingo24 to cancel the project. Project cancellations are covered by our standard terms and conditions
  • FINISHED - projects move to this status once all of the project's jobs have been completed.

The following are the status codes associated with a Job:

  • NEW - the job has been created in our system and is waiting to be analyzed.
  • ANALYZING - the job is being analyzed. Switching to this status from NEW is done automatically.
  • QUOTED - the job has been analyzed and has both metrics and price available.
  • IN_PROGRESS - the job is currently underway at Lingo24.
  • TRANSLATED - the job is now finished, with the target files available for collection via the File resource.
  • CANCELLED - the job has been cancelled.

API Specification