Abstract: Embodiments of the invention provide systems and methods for translating application strings between entities using a semantical (definition-based) translation scheme. Embodiments of the invention provide the ability to design and create an application user interface that can be reliably and efficiently localized. For one embodiment, each string is semantically defined and the definition is used to determine a corresponding display value for each entity (e.g., human language) of interest. Additionally, for one embodiment, a sparse-matrix data structure is employed to reduce the associated metadata.