fiat glossa - a translator

Fiat Glossa

glossa is the tongue. In the old manuscripts, a gloss was what someone wrote in the margin when a word was hard — a quiet translation, right where you needed it. This app is that margin note.

What it does

Type or paste a word or phrase, pick a language pair, and get a translation back. Nothing more complicated than that. There's also a second, quieter feature: an on-device word table that respells English between Traditional (British) and Simplified (American) spelling — colour to color, favourite to favorite — no network call, no characters spent, just a lookup that happens on the phone. Noah Webster spent decades trying to convince the world that dropping letters counts as progress. Glossa remains neutral. Mostly.

Your data

Translations come from DeepL, using an API key that belongs to you. fiat glossa has no server and no account of its own: your text goes from the phone straight to DeepL, using your key, and nowhere else. You'll need to bring your own DeepL API key — a free-tier key covers a generous amount of translation before any cost applies. Nothing is logged, stored, or sent anywhere by us, because there is no "us" in the data path at all.

On the name

fiat — let it be done. glossa — the tongue, the word, the gloss in the margin. Let the word be understood.

The motto: Non verbum e verbo, sed sensum exprimere de sensu — "Not word for word, but sense for sense." Jerome, writing about translation sixteen centuries ago, and still the best short description of what a good translation does.