# Get translation type by ID

`GET /api/translation-types/{translationTypeId}`

- **Success:** `200 OK`
- **Products:** Operator (`FOH`)
- **Features:** Front of House Generic Access (`FOHGENERIC`)

HTML version: [Get translation type by ID](https://support.gladstonesoftware.cloud/reference/configuration/get-translation-type-by-id)

## Overview

Returns one translation type — the definition of a *category* of thing that can be translated, such
as `Site`, `Product`, `ActivityGroup`, `PriceLevel` or `Membership`. Every translated string on the
platform is filed against a translation type, the id of the record it belongs to, the property being
translated, and a culture; this endpoint describes the first of those four.

**The commonest misreading is the `translations` array.** It does not contain the translations of
the records in this category. It contains the translations of the translation type's own label —
the word "Product" rendered in Welsh, French and so on — so it is typically small, and empty on a
single-language tenant. There is no way to get, say, every product translation from here; product
translations come back on the product endpoints themselves.

Use it when you already hold a numeric translation type id and need its `type` string or its
localised label. To discover the ids in the first place, call
[Get all translation types](get-all-translation-types.md), which returns the
same shape as an array — and if you are going to look up more than one, fetch the list once and
index it locally rather than calling this repeatedly.

The response is a subset of what the platform holds about a translation type. The configuration
flags that govern how a type behaves during import and export — whether it also carries a name, and
whether it carries web comments — are not exposed here.

## Endpoint

`GET {base_url}/api/translation-types/{translationTypeId}`

`{base_url}` is the environment URL issued to your integration. See [Authenticating with Gladstone APIs](../../guides/authenticating-with-gladstone-apis.md).

## Path parameters

| Name | Type | Required | Description |
|------|------|----------|-------------|
| `translationTypeId` | integer (int32) | Yes | The translation type's numeric id, as returned in the `id` field by [Get all translation types](get-all-translation-types.md). It is a platform-generated integer, not the `type` name — you cannot pass `Product` here and have it resolve; that is a `400`, because the value is not an integer. An integer that matches no translation type returns `404`. |

## Sample request

```bash title="cURL"
curl -X GET '{base_url}/api/translation-types/4' \
  -H 'Authorization: Bearer {accessToken}' \
  -H 'X-Use-SSO: true'
```

## Response fields

| Field | Type | Description |
|-------|------|-------------|
| `id` | integer (int32) | The translation type's numeric id, echoing the value you requested. This is the id other translation calls expect wherever a translation type is identified numerically. |
| `type` | string | The translation type's stable code name, maximum 50 characters and never null — for example `Site`, `Product`, `ActivityGroup`, `PriceLevel`, `Membership` or `BookingSheetType`. This, rather than `id`, is the value used where translation types are named as strings, and it is the value to key any mapping in your own code on, because it does not vary between environments in the way a generated integer can. |
| `description` | string | A longer, human-readable explanation of the category, up to 512 characters. It is nullable and frequently is null, so fall back to `type` when you need something to display. |
| `translations` | array of object | Localised renderings of **this translation type's own label**, not of any record in the category — see the Overview. `[]` when nothing has been translated, which is the normal state on a single-language tenant and is not an error. At most one entry exists per culture and property combination. |
| `translations[].culture` | string | The culture this rendering is for, up to 20 characters, matching a code in the platform's culture list — `cy-gb`, `en-gb`, `fr`, `de`, `es`, `pt`, `gd` and similar. **The codes are lower-case**, so compare case-insensitively rather than against a hard-coded `en-GB`. |
| `translations[].type` | string | **Misleadingly named**: this is not the translation type. It is the name of the *property* being translated on the translation type, so expect values such as `Description` or `Name`. Because this array is not filtered to one property, several entries can share a `culture` and differ only by this field — key on `culture` plus `type` together, never on `culture` alone. |
| `translations[].text` | string | The translated text, maximum 255 characters. Never null for an entry that exists. |
| `translations[].language` | string | An optional sub-language qualifier held alongside `culture`. **It is always `null` on this endpoint** — the field is present in the JSON but never carries a value. Do not branch on it here. |

## Sample response

```json title="200 OK"
{
  "id": 4,
  "type": "Product",
  "description": "Retail and catering products",
  "translations": [
    {
      "culture": "cy-gb",
      "type": "Description",
      "text": "Cynhyrchion manwerthu ac arlwyo",
      "language": null
    }
  ]
}
```

## Errors

| Status | Meaning | When |
|--------|---------|------|
| `400` | Bad request | `{translationTypeId}` is not a whole number — for example a `type` name such as `Product` was sent instead of the numeric id. The request is rejected before the lookup runs, so the body is a validation problem document (`application/problem+json`) with an `errors` map keyed by field name, rather than the plain-text strings this API returns elsewhere. |
| `404` | Not found | No translation type has that id. The body is a plain-text string: `There is no translation type that matches the request`. Note there is no full stop, and note the status — this endpoint returns `404` for a missing record, unlike several other Configuration lookups that answer `400`. |
| `500` | Internal server error | An unexpected server-side failure reading the translation types or their translations. The body is empty. |