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LokAI Docs

Architecture

Overview

Section titled “Overview”

LokAI is structured around a clear hierarchy of concepts that map directly to how software teams organize their work.

Workspace

Section titled “Workspace”

A Workspace is the top-level container for a company or team. Everything in LokAI belongs to a workspace: projects, glossaries, style guides, and tenants.

Project

Section titled “Project”

A Project represents a single product or application being localized. Each project has:

  • Main languages — the source language(s) that humans own and maintain
  • Target languages — languages translated automatically by the LLM
  • Secondary languages — additional human-maintained languages

Translation Key

Section titled “Translation Key”

A Translation Key is a single translatable string. Keys carry rich metadata:

  • A maintainer (the developer or team responsible)
  • A description and context
  • Per-language translations with ownership and status
  • Flags (do_not_translate, do_not_customize)

Glossary

Section titled “Glossary”

A workspace-level Glossary defines preferred and forbidden terms. The LLM respects these rules in every translation it produces.

Style Guide

Section titled “Style Guide”

A Style Guide is a Markdown document that instructs the LLM on tone, formality, capitalization, and product-specific conventions.

Tenants

Section titled “Tenants”

Tenants are B2B customers who need custom terminology in their translations. Each tenant defines term replacements with natural-language context that the LLM interprets at translation time.

Access model

Section titled “Access model”

LokAI uses a Permission / Role / Grant model.

  • A permission is an atomic action such as keys.create or translations.approve.
  • A role is a bundle of permissions.
  • A grant is the actual assignment of a role to a subject within a scope.

Current built-in roles:

  • owner
  • admin
  • project_manager
  • developer
  • designer
  • translator
  • reviewer
  • viewer

Grants can be:

  • organization-scoped: apply to the whole workspace
  • project-scoped: apply only to one project
  • language-filtered: limit only language-scoped actions such as writing or approving translations

Token subjects

Section titled “Token subjects”

In addition to human users, LokAI supports machine identities:

  • PATs (personal access tokens) are bound to one user and one workspace. They must declare explicit scopes and can never exceed the owning user's current permissions.
  • WATs (workspace access tokens) are bound to a workspace, not to a user. They are intended for automation and are gated by both capability and quota checks.

Capability and quota gates

Section titled “Capability and quota gates”

Authorization is not only about permissions. Some actions are also controlled by plan state:

  • Capabilities decide whether a feature is enabled at all, such as workspace tokens or tenant customizations.
  • Quotas decide whether a mutation can still consume capacity, such as creating another project or minting another PAT.

See Plans & Limits for the current matrix.

Ownership model

Section titled “Ownership model”

| Language type | Owner | Write access | | ------------------- | ----- | ------------ | | Main languages | Human | Human only | | Secondary languages | Human | Human only | | Target languages | LLM | LLM only |

Next steps

Section titled “Next steps”