Translate
Translate company documents inside Railbase — Office files, PDFs, scans and quick text, with glossary control and clear machine-translation limits.
Problems it solves
- Contracts, reports and policies pile up in a translation backlog while teams wait for manual copy-paste or outside vendors.
- Sensitive documents need a controlled workflow: who submitted them, which engine processed them, what quota was used, and what was downloaded.
- Formatting breaks on every round-trip — tables, headers and layout in Word, Excel and PowerPoint get rebuilt by hand.
- Scanned PDFs need OCR first, and the quality depends on the host OS and the scan.
- The same term gets translated five different ways unless terminology is managed before the machine-translation step.
Translate turns your Railbase into a company-wide document translation service. Upload a Word, Excel, PowerPoint, PDF, Markdown or text file, pick the target language, and download the translated copy from the same site account. Scanned PDFs are recognized through the host's OCR engine. Translation runs in the background with progress, quota checks, glossary protection and a visible machine-translation disclaimer.
Translate is a data-resident Railbase module: jobs, glossary, settings, usage and file blobs live in your Railbase Vault, and the UI is mounted at /translate when the marketplace install is active. The text that needs translation may still be sent to external machine-translation providers unless your administrator disables external processing or restricts the allowed providers.
What you get
- Office and PDF document flow. DOCX, XLSX, PPTX and PDF files are extracted, translated and rendered back by Railbase host capabilities; Markdown and plain text are supported for lighter workflows.
- Background jobs with control. Users can submit, pause, resume, cancel, archive and download jobs, with live progress, notifications, retry paths and owner-scoped job lists.
- OCR for scans. Scanned PDFs use Apple Vision on macOS, Windows OCR on Windows, and optional Tesseract on Linux. Unsupported image codecs, encrypted PDFs and poor scans can still fail or produce lower-quality text.
- Glossary protection. Company, product and industry terms can be managed or imported as CSV. Terms are protected before the provider call and restored afterwards for the selected language pair.
- Provider choice and spend controls. Free best-effort engines are included (Google free endpoint, MyMemory, Lingva) with fallback. Pro deployments can bring their own DeepL, Google or Azure key; admins can cap daily provider characters, restrict allowed providers and disable external processing.
- Usage and compliance visibility. The plugin tracks monthly documents, pages, characters, OCR pages, quota rejections and provider usage; it exposes active provider/compliance settings and writes best-effort audit events for important actions.
How it works
- Upload a document or paste text, then pick source and target languages. Source can be auto-detected.
- Railbase reserves quota, extracts the document, applies glossary protection, then translates segment by segment in a background job.
- Users see progress and can pause, resume, cancel, retry, archive or download the result when it is ready.
Pricing
From $99 per month for the whole company — one subscription covers every app user, never a per-seat fee. Basic ($99/mo) includes a fair-use monthly quota (1,000,000 characters / 200 pages / 100 documents). Pro ($399/mo) raises it to 5,000,000 characters / 1,000 pages / 500 documents and supports your own professional provider key. Max is for custom quotas, stricter controls and support needs. Quota is enforced before work runs and again after extraction; over quota, users get a clear message instead of a surprise charge.
Good to know
- This is machine translation. It saves hours, but a person who knows both languages must proofread before official, legal or business use. Jobs can complete with untranslated segments; those are disclosed in the result metadata.
- Free engines are best effort and can be rate-limited or unavailable. A BYO provider key improves control and capacity but still sends translated text to that provider unless external processing is disabled.
- For PDF — scans included — Railbase keeps the original page background where possible and writes translated text back into place. Fonts, spacing, OCR and complex layouts are best effort; CJK, Arabic and Hebrew PDF output are out of scope for the current PDF renderer, while Office formats keep their own fonts.
- Retention is policy-driven, not a fixed deletion timer. Admin settings can expire source blobs, result blobs and archived jobs; legal hold can prevent purge. A hidden job is removed from the user's list, while managed document copies remain governed by document retention and audit policy.
- Access is user-scoped for normal jobs. Managers can be granted broader job/archive/glossary visibility by role; the finer-grained permissions declared by the bundle are the forward contract while the runtime still checks the user's role in-handler.
Part of your Railbase
Translate works together with the rest of your Railbase modules through the event bus: other modules can request a document translation, get a rejection event when license/quota/provider policy blocks it, and receive a completion event with the translated document. One login, one tenant, one Railbase security model.
Machine translation may contain mistakes. Proofreading by a person is required before official use.
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