AI Translate — Translation Service

• Area: Intelligence
• Path: services/ai/translate
• Kind: Translation as a service (text + document + glossary), pt-BR ↔ en-US priority
• Status: v0.1.0 — foundation shipped (2026-05-24); Provider interface + Stub, glossary resolution (text + document paths), feedback endpoint, Go SDK

Role in the stack

translate centralizes a capability that was previously scattered: every Koder UI is bilingual by policy (policies/language.kmd — chat pt-BR, products en-US), and every product was calling gateway/ ad-hoc with full LLM cost per translation, no caching, no glossary enforcement. This sector consolidates the capability so every consumer calls one endpoint and gets the right answer at the right cost — cached repeats, brand-aware glossary, NMT-first routing with LLM fallback for hard cases.

It is the Koder analog of DeepL and Google Translate API, scoped to the language pairs that matter for Koder products and explicitly distinct from signs/ (sign language is a separate domain, not translation between natural languages).

Boundary vs neighbors

• services/ai/signs is sign language — separate domain, not natural-language translation.
• services/ai/cache provides the segment-level translation cache backend.
• services/ai/prompt owns translation prompt templates.
• services/ai/gateway is the LLM-fallback path; services/ai/runtime serves NMT models.
• i18n pipeline (koder_kit, koder_web_kit, engines/sdk/go/l10n) is the primary product-facing consumer.

Features (v1 target)

• Synchronous text translation (pt-BR ↔ en-US priority, +eszhja secondary)
• Async document translation with format preservation (md, html, json, po, xliff)
• Per-tenant glossary + Koder-official base (versioned in repo)
• NMT-first routing (NLLB-200 default), LLM fallback for low-confidence/long-form
• Confidence scoring + human feedback loop (corrections feed cache + prompt signal)
• CLI ktrans for i18n bundle sync (en-US baseline → pt-BReszh/ja)
• ICU placeholder integrity validation
• Per-tenant rate limit; resumable document jobs

Primary couplings

RFC and bootstrap

• RFC: translate-RFC-001-foundations.kmd — accepted 2026-05-09
• Bootstrap ticket: services/ai/backlog/done/131-translate-bootstrap.md
• Implementation tickets: services/ai/translate/backlog/pending/{001..005}

Self-hosted-first analysis (5 gates)