translate_skill

Overview

This skill translates text accurately while preserving formatting, placeholders, and structural elements. It handles plurals, gender, formality, and locale-specific conversions so translations read naturally in the target culture. It is built to avoid altering code, markup, or technical tokens and to keep consistent terminology across a document.

How this skill works

The skill inspects the full source text to detect and protect non-translatable regions such as code blocks, HTML tags, placeholders, URLs, and technical identifiers. It applies language-specific rules for plurals, gender agreement, and register, and performs cultural adaptations like unit and date conversion when appropriate. It also generates or enforces a glossary for repeated terms to maintain consistency and verifies that formatting remains functional after translation.

When to use it

• Localizing product documentation while keeping code samples and API endpoints intact
• Translating marketing copy that requires correct tone and cultural adaptation
• Converting user interface strings with correct pluralization and formality
• Preparing multilingual legal or business content where precision and consistent terminology matter

Best practices

• Scan the entire document before translating to capture context and ambiguous terms
• Protect placeholders and code blocks by marking them as non-translatable tokens
• Create and reuse a glossary for brand names, technical terms, and preferred translations
• Choose formality and pronoun usage based on the audience and locale, document the choice
• Perform a post-translation pass to verify formatting, links, numbers, and cultural conversions

Example use cases

• Localize developer docs: preserve code samples, endpoints, and JSON keys while translating descriptions
• Translate a marketing campaign: adapt idioms, currency, and date formats to target markets
• Prepare app UI strings: ensure correct plurals and gender agreement in labels and messages
• Convert blog posts: keep markdown structure, links, and headings intact while adapting tone
• Archive multilingual backups: maintain original formatting and placeholders for future restores