A string is a piece of human-readable text stored as a value in a software or data file, as opposed to the code, keys, or variables that reference it.
Why String Matters
String matters because localization tools need to translate only the text meant for a human reader, and leave everything else — code syntax, variable names, structural markup — untouched. In a JSON file, for example, a key-value pair like "welcome_message": "Welcome back!" contains one string, "Welcome back!", which gets translated, and one key, welcome_message, which stays exactly as it was because code and build processes look it up by that name. Translating the key instead of the string would break every reference to it.
This distinction isn’t unique to JSON. Nearly every software and structured-data format that Taia translates — JSON, XML, YAML, resource files inside DOCX or IDML, and other developer or app-localization formats — separates translatable strings from non-translatable structure in the same way. Numbers, booleans, null values, and placeholder tokens are not strings and are not translated; only the actual text content is.
Strings are the basic unit of software and UI localization the way segments are the basic unit of document translation: a mobile app’s button labels, error messages, and menu items are each individually a string, and a full app localization job is really a large batch of strings translated consistently against a shared glossary and style guide.
A Concrete Example
A software company localizing its app’s settings screen has a JSON resource file containing entries like "save_button": "Save" and "cancel_button": "Cancel". When the file is translated into German, only the values change — "Save" becomes "Speichern" and "Cancel" becomes "Abbrechen" — while the keys save_button and cancel_button remain unchanged, so the app’s code continues to find the right translated text by the same key it always used.
How String Translation Works in Taia
Taia translates strings directly inside structured files like JSON, without a conversion step, translating only the string values and leaving keys, numbers, and code structure untouched, using the same translation memory, glossary, and style guide shared across every format. See Taia’s JSON translation page for the detailed mechanics of how string values are located and translated inside a real file.