You don't always have to translate a string from scratch as a translator. If the string you're translating is similar to one translated in the past, a translation suggestion will appear in the Editor's Suggestions tab.

Each time a translation is saved, it's added to a database known as Translation Memory (TM for short). Then, untranslated strings are compared against translated ones to see if there are similarities between the two.

If a string has a Translation Memory match, it'll appear in the Suggestions tab of the Editor with a percentage next to the suggestion. The percentage shows how similar the string you're currently translating is to the source string of the suggested translation.

The higher the percentage, the more similar the two source strings are. A 100% match means the two source strings are exactly the same. In such a case, it might be safe to reuse the translation.

For example, let's say you're translating the word "Password", and similar phrases were translated in the past. You might see something like this in the Suggestions tab:

The first is a 100% match because it's exactly the same word as the one you're translating. The second is a 66% match – while the source phrase contains the word "password," it's different from what you're translating.

The TM suggestions are clickable: the available link redirects you to the source entry where the suggested translation version was initially applied.

To use a TM suggestion:

There are also keyboard shortcuts to use the first TM suggestion:

If you have a high-match TM suggestion, it might be helpful to see what exactly changed in the source string since the last time it was translated (and stored in TM).

To do so, click the first icon with two arrows, "Show difference with source". It will highlight the words and characters not present in the source (in red) and those added to the new version of the source string (in green).

If you want to enable this view permanently, you can toggle the "Show difference with previous" option in the editor preferences. This way, you will always be able to view these differences.

Concordance search lets you search through the Translation Memory for a specific word or phrase and see how it was translated elsewhere. This is useful when there's no TM suggestion for a string, but you still want to see how something was translated elsewhere.

To use concordance search:

Concordance search works on top of a project's Translation Memory. If a project shares TM with other projects, the search results will be from all those projects. Please take a look at Sharing Translation Memory for more details.

While working in the Editor, you may get strings already translated by the Translation Memory (see the "Translated by TM" line in the screenshot below).

The TM automatically fills up these translations, as the same source string was already translated elsewhere.

To see all the strings translated by the Translation Memory, use the filter ORIGIN and select the TM from the list.