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Deleting a Translation Memory Suggestion
Deleting a Translation Memory Suggestion

Delete unneeded or unwanted suggestions from your Translation Memory.

Jacob avatar
Written by Jacob
Updated over a week ago

📝Note: Deleting Translation Memory entries is a feature only available on the Growth plan and up. Only Admins and Project Maintainers can delete entries from TM.

When you no longer want a translation to show up as a suggestion and be populated by TM when 100% similarity matches are detected — for example, when a word or phrase is poorly translated or your brand changes — you can remove it from your project's TM. There are a few ways to clean your Translation Memory.


Deleting TM entries through the Editor

To delete a TM entry inside the Editor:

  1. From inside the Editor, navigate to the TM suggestion you want to delete.

  2. Click the x next to the suggestion.

    remove_TM_entry_editor.png#asset:4663

  3. Press Yes to confirm you want to delete the entry in the popup. If the suggestion you want to delete comes from a pluralized string, all the plural forms will be deleted when you confirm the action. If other non-pluralized strings exactly match the selected entry, these will be deleted as well. Specifically:

    1. When you delete a non-pluralized TM suggestion, the system will delete all the non-pluralized source-translation text matches, regardless of context or similar locales.

    2. When you delete a plural form of a pluralized TM suggestion, the system will delete the following:

      1. All non-pluralized source-translation text matches, regardless of context or similar locales.

      2. All pluralized source-translation text matches, regardless of context or similar locales, when all forms match for both source and target text.


Deleting TM entries through your project settings

Another way to delete a TM entry is from your project settings. There, you'll be able to search for a term in your source language and see every source string that contains that term along with the corresponding translation.

To do this:

  1. From the Dashboard, click on the project with the TM you want to clean up.

  2. Click on Settings.

  3. In the submenu, click on General.

  4. In the Translation Memory Actions section, click the Manage Translation Memory... link. You will be redirected to the Manage Translation Memory page, where you can remove the desired TM entries. You can find more information about how this can be done here.


Clean up your TM in bulk

Sometimes, you might want to do a bulk cleanup of your Translation Memory instead of removing a few suggestions. We allow you to do this by overwriting your project TM with contents from a TMX file you upload.

⚠️Warning: Please proceed with caution and back up your original TMX before importing a new one.

To clean up your TM:

  1. Download the TMX file you want to clean up. If you only want to clean up the TM for one language, only download the TMX file for that language.

  2. Open up your TMX file in a text editor such as Atom or Sublime, then remove the unwanted translation entries from your TMX file. You can remove a translation entry for a single language by removing everything between <tuv...> and </tuv>. The Portuguese (pt_PT) translation will be removed in the example below.

    TMX-tuv.png#asset:4716

    Or you can remove entries for all languages by removing a whole <tu>...</tu> block.

    TMX-tu.png#asset:4717
  3. Save your TMX file when you’re finished editing it. We recommend saving a new version and backing up the original export somewhere safe.

  4. Head to the Settings page of the project you exported the TMX file from, and in the General tab, click on the Import content from a TM... link.

  5. In the modal, select the TMX file you want to import, then check the box that says Overwrite existing TM and rebuild it from the TMX file. In the dropdown that appears, choose which language(s) in your TM you wish to overwrite from your TMX file.

TMX-import-overwrite.png#asset:4718

6. Click Import, enter your password, and click OVERWRITE TM to finish the import.

There are a few things to note:

  • Translations not in the TMX file are removed from your TM. They will no longer appear as suggestions or be used for TM Autofill.

  • Unchanged translations in the TMX file will remain in your TM.

  • New/edited translations in the TMX file are added to your TM.

  • Translations for other languages in your TM will remain unchanged if you overwrite only one language.


What happens when you remove TM entries

When you remove suggestions from your TM, already translated strings will not be affected; they'll remain translated.

In Transifex, each project has its own TM. If your project is part of a Translation Memory group/TM priorities, removing TM entries from one project will also affect the TM entries of other projects belonging to the same group.


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