In Transifex, you can lock a resource and prevent translators from submitting new translations or editing existing ones. This is useful if you're waiting for new content to be pushed to Transifex and don't want translators to work on anything yet or if you're happy with the translations and don't want any changes before they go live.

Here's how you can lock a resource if you're an Organization Administrator or Project Maintainer:

After that, your resource looks like this:

The team members assigned to the project won't be able to enter the editor and work on that resource. If they try, they'll see the following message:

When a resource is locked, you can still update the source content and download the translation for use.

Locking strings is a more granular method of ensuring specific pieces of content won't receive any undesired modifications, but the rest of the resource can be translated and edited freely. Please keep reading to explore the various ways to lock strings and how they can be integrated into your workflow.

If you would like to prevent certain strings from being translated into all languages, you can use the following two smart tags:

notranslate: As a project maintainer, you can configure on a project level, as a pre-translation step, what will happen if the notranslate tag is assigned to a string:

Here are the steps on how you can apply this tag for a string or selection of strings in bulk.

1. Changing how the notranslate tag behaves through the project's settings only affects newly tagged strings and freshly added languages. Strings that have already been tagged and languages already added to the project are not affected by this change

2. Translations automatically submitted by the system once the notranslate tag is assigned to a string are not added to the project's translation memory as suggestions. Only translation history is updated

3. After the application of the notranslate tag on source strings, these source strings are marked as completed (reviewed or proofread depending on the project's configuration - languages' stats are also updated accordingly)

4. If the notranslate tag is removed from a:

5. Strings tagged as notranslate are not automatically translated by Machine Translation or Translation Memory.

6. In the editor, the Machine Translation option cannot be applied to strings tagged as notranslate.

When you edit a source string online with the 'notranslate' tag set to 'Replace Target with Source', the translations will be preserved during source updates on 'Save Changes.'

This ensures that the ‘notranslate’ tag works consistently, allowing controlled updates to translations based on the configured ‘Replace Target with Source’ behavior.

locked: When you tag a string with locked, the translator can't make edits to translations in the translation box. This is useful when you want to make sure a particular existing translation should not be modified anymore by translators.

Here are the steps on how you can apply this tag for a string or selection of strings in bulk.

1. When a locked tag is assigned to a string, this string is locked for all project's target languages (existing languages as well as any new languages added in the future)

2. When a locked tag is assigned to a string, the string is marked as completed (reviewed or proofread depending on the project's configuration - languages' stats are also updated accordingly). If the previous state of the string were untranslated, the new string's state would be either reviewed or proofread with the translation box empty since no translation was provided before tagging

3. Machine Translation or Translation Memory does not automatically translate strings tagged as locked. Also, such strings cannot be translated via file upload or API.

4. In the editor, the Machine Translation option cannot be applied to strings that have been tagged as locked

5. When a locked tag is removed, the string returns to its previous state (translated, untranslated, reviewed, or proofread)

6. Updating the value of the source string will result in its translations being marked as not reviewed or not proofread

Save Changes:

Save and Keep Translations:

Depending on whether the 'keep_translations' option is enabled, the behavior will align with the 'Online Source Edits' section. If enabled, the 'Save and Keep Translations' behavior will apply; if not, the 'Save Changes' behavior will be followed.

Depending on whether the 'Keep existing translations' option is enabled, the behavior will align with the 'Online Source Edits' section. If enabled, the 'Save and Keep Translations' behavior will apply; if not, the 'Save Changes' behavior will be followed.

If you would like to prevent certain strings from being translated into particular languages, you can use the smart tag in the following format:

locked_lang_code: (ex. locked_it, locked_pt, locked_es_ES). Please note that this tag is not case-sensitive: pt_BR and pt_br are considered the same.

Here are the steps on how you can apply this tag for a string or selection of strings in bulk.

1. When a locked_lang_code tag is assigned to a string, this string is locked for the specific project's target language (other languages, as well as any new languages added in the future, are not being affected)

2. When a locked_lang_code tag is assigned to a string, the string is marked as completed (reviewed or proofread depending on the project's configuration - languages' stats are also updated accordingly). If the previous state of the string was untranslated, the new string's state will be either reviewed or proofread with the translation box empty since no translation was provided before tagging

3. Strings tagged as locked_lang_code are not automatically translated by Machine Translation or Translation Memory. Also, such strings cannot be translated via file upload or API

4. In the editor, the Machine Translation option cannot be applied to strings that have been tagged as locked_lang_code

5. When a locked_lang_code tag is removed, the string returns to its previous state (translated, untranslated, reviewed, or proofread)

6. Updating the value of the source string and choosing not to save the translations will result in the translations being marked as not reviewed or not proofread

For all these tags, you can enable the following translation checks (as an error or warning):

As a project maintainer, you can configure how translations of strings with the locked_lang_code tag are affected during online source edits.

Example of the Behavior:

Suppose a source string is translated into French (tagged with locked_fr) and German (untagged), and the setting for locked_lang_code is configured to “not affect translations.” When you choose "Save Changes" after editing the source, the following will occur:

If "empty translations" is selected as a configuration option instead, then translations for both languages will be deleted. However, the status of the French translation will remain finalized because the tag is still being applied.