It can be used to translate various kinds of texts but is commonly used for creating localisations for software interfaces.

[4] For MediaWiki on Wikimedia Foundation projects, new localisations may reach live sites within a day.

[10] At the end of 2007 Siebrand Mazeland joined the management of the website, which was moved to the current domain translatewiki.net.

In April 2008, it already supported over 100 languages for MediaWiki and 200 of its extensions, "making it one of the most translated software projects ever", as well as FreeCol.

[17][non-primary source needed] Some projects use translatewiki.net's software (the Translate extension) in a self-hosted fashion: