After creating a Live resource, you’re ready to add strings from your website to Transifex for translation. Through this string approval process, you can select precisely which strings to save for translations and which ones to leave untranslated.

TX Live detects strings for approval whenever:

you load your page(s) inside transifex live preview (snippet is not required for strings’ approval in this case)

you and/or visitors navigate through your web pages outside transifex (in this case, snippet is required to be installed)

Before we show you how to approve strings, let’s look at how you can navigate through your site in Transifex Live and get to the pages with the content you want to approve.

Note

Only Organization Administrators and Project Maintainers can manage (approve or ignore) strings.

Navigating through your website

First, go to Transifex Live. If you have the Live snippet installed, head to your website and type in your website’s URL, then add ?transifex to the end.

For example:

If your website was <a href="http://www.example.com">www.example.com</a>, type <a href="http://www.example.com/?transifex">www.example.com/?transifex</a>. If you have parameters in your website URL, e.g. <a href="http://www.example.com?product=1234">www.example.com?product=1234</a>, then add at the end &transifexinstead.

If you're not already logged in, you’ll be asked to log in to Transifex. If you’re using the in-app version of Transifex Live, select a project from the Dashboard and click the Live button in the right panel.

Note

If you’re translating content from a staging server, be sure you go to or select the staging domain instead of your production domain.

Once your site is loaded, you’ll see it highlighted in blue all the phrases Transifex has detected.

There are a few ways to navigate through your site:

Double-click on a link on your site to go to the linked page.
Type the URL of the page you want to go to into your browser’s address bar if you’re using the on-site sidebar or the address bar inside the in-app version of Transifex Live.
Open the URL panel in the sidebar and click on one of the URL paths in the Pages tab. The list of URLs includes pages you’ve navigated to previously. If you’ve installed the Live snippet on your site, pages your visitors have been to will also appear in the list.

Note

In the sidebar, the URL panel always shows the URL path of the page you're on.

Approving strings

To approve strings and save them to the resource you created earlier:

In the right sidebar of Live, click on Manage strings. A new panel will open up; it’s divided into three tabs: Detected, Approved, and Ignored.
The Detected tab shows you all the strings Transifex has detected on the current page. You can also apply the On page filter to see the strings currently displayed on your webpage.

You can also check if some strings appear not only on this particular webpage but on other pages as well - by looking at the number of occurrences of a particular string. Click on N occurrences and see what other web pages this string appears on.

Use the checkboxes to select the strings you want to save to Transifex. The Select all strings checkbox at the top lets you quickly select all detected strings on the page.
Once you’ve selected the strings you want to save to Transifex, click Approve.

Approved strings turn green and are moved to the Approved tab.

Another way to approve strings is to hover your cursor over highlighted strings and hit the checkmark icon. This is slower than batch approving strings but might be useful in situations where you have many detected strings but only want to approve a small selection of them from the page.

Note

Detected strings include both strings that are visible to the users, as well as ones that aren’t, such as title tags, meta descriptions, and alt tags.

Chronological Order

To have the strings appear in the right order in the Editor, you should be approving strings manually string by string in the Live interface.

Handling dynamic content

Dynamic content such as dates, times, and counters (e.g. # of articles, # of comments, etc.) shouldn’t be translated. When approving phrases, you should ignore these types of nontranslatable dynamic content (see the section below on ignoring content). Or if you're able to edit the HTML, you can mark page elements as nontranslatable.

Translating undetected attributes

If you have attributes that Transifex Live does not detect by default, but you still want them to be localized, then the following steps should be followed:

Go to the Transifex Live preview
Open the Live settings
Add the corresponding attribute name to the Translate tag attributes field:

Please note that if the text in the form is a placeholder that is not automatically detected by Live, after adding this to the above field, it won't be highlighted in the Transifex Live preview. However, such strings can be found under the Detected tab so that they can be approved and translated into the project's target languages.

Quickly finding strings

If you have a lot of content on your site, you’ll also have a lot of strings to manage. Within the Manage strings panel, there are a few tools available to help you quickly find a specific string or understand its history:

A search field for finding a specific word or phrase.
A filter next to the search field to filter for all strings ever detected on the page, strings currently on the page, and strings that were once detected but no longer on the page.
The initial date Transifex Live detected each phrase on a page. This helps distinguish phrases from older versions of a page.
The number of times a string appears on your site.

Ignoring strings

Not every string on your site needs to be translated; for example, you may not want to translate your company’s name or phrases such as “© 2021.” You can leave these strings out of Transifex by marking them as ignored. Ignored strings don’t count towards your plan’s word count; visitors will simply see that string in your site’s source (original) language.

Ignoring a string works similarly to approving a string:

From the sidebar, click on Manage strings.
In the Detected tab, select all the strings you want to ignore.
Once you’ve selected the strings, you want to ignore, click Ignore.

Tip

Ignored strings are moved to the Ignored tab. You can either leave strings there or delete them. Deleting a string removes it (and any translations it has) from Transifex. If the string is detected again, it'll appear back in the Detected tab.

And like before, you can hover your cursor over a string to mark it as ignored. Click the “x” icon instead of the checkmark to ignore a string.

Ignoring pages

Through the Transifex Live sidebar, you can ignore a whole page by including the URL of the page in the live filters, as described here.

Once a page is ignored:

This is no longer part of the list of pages in the sidebar.
Detected strings that are part of that page are no longer available under the detected tab when you load the page in Transifex Live view.
Ignored strings are no longer available under the ignored tab when you load the page in Transifex Live view.
Approved strings that are part of that page will be removed from the list of strings in Transifex if this page is the only one to which these strings belong to.

Warning

If these strings belong to more pages, we will keep them as part of the approved strings list.

How to Remove Strings That Are no Longer On Your Website

If some strings are no longer present on your website, you might also want to delete those strings from your Transifex project.

To delete strings:

Click on See overview on the sidebar.
Click on Manage strings.
Click on the filter icon.
Select Not on any page.

Not on any page filter returns strings that have not been detected by TX Live during a specific period of time, i.e.:

strings that are no longer part of the page (they have been removed from the source code)
strings that are still part of the page, but no user has visited the page lately

Once you get the results, you can select one or more strings and delete them.

Please note that you have the option to define the day limit under your live settings.

Specifically, after enabling the option "Identify new strings when page content changes", you can set up the daily limit that TX Live will rely on to define which strings should be "tagged" as not on page (the default setting is 15 days) as you can see in the screenshot below:

Setting URL filters

URL filters allow you to ignore whole URL paths, map one path to another, and keep your list of detected pages and strings cleaner. This is useful if there are sections of your site that you’d like to leave untranslated (e.g. your blog), or if you want to combine multiple pages sharing content and URL pattern.

Each filter is made of:

A Match method: contains, equals, starts with, ends with, etc.
A URL path to match.
A Filter action: ignore or map.
An Output URL path (optional).

To set up a URL filter:

Head to the URL filters tab in the Manage strings panel.
Click on Add new filter.
Create a rule for the filter.
Click Add to save the URL filter.

Let’s look at two examples:

To ignore strings from your blog on www.example.com/blog/, choose: starts with/blog/, ignore.
To combine all user profile pages that leave in a URL structure like /profile/<username> under a single URL, choose starts with/profile/, map to, /profile.

Managing strings across your site

In addition to approving and ignoring strings on a page level, you can also do it on a site level.

To do this, simply click on See Overview in the sidebar. This makes all string counters and strings in the Manage strings panel appear on a page level.

In this view, you also have the option to filter your strings and easily identify which of them have not been detected by TX Live during the last 15 days (this limit is customizable and can be configured according to your needs) and remove them from DETECTED or/and APPROVED tab.

Handling source updates

When a translatable string is detected by Live, a uniquely defined hash is automatically generated based on the source text. This is considered the identifier of the string that Transifex Live uses to map the translations to the corresponding source strings and serve them via our CDN. This hash can be found under the context tab in the editor after approving the string:

When an already approved string is modified in your HTML code, it is marked as "NOT ON PAGE" in Transifex Live since this version of the string is no longer part of your website page.

As far as the newly modified version of the string, it can be found under the DETECTED tab as a completely new entry that needs to be approved for translation. Please note that translations are served by Transifex after the source string is approved, translated, and its translation is finally published.

To have the translations beforehand and ensure that your visitors will see your website pages fully translated, we suggest you use a staging site. The goal is to approve and translate the new content before it is live. That way, when the translations are done, you can then apply the changes to your production site along with the already submitted translations.

This can easily be done since Transifex Live offers you the option to provide both a production and a staging domain for the same Live resource, and also you have the option to decide where the translations should be published first - each domain has its own settings in Transifex Live preview.

So, whenever the content on your website changes, as a localization manager, you will need to:

Go through the approving process again: i.e.

Enter Transifex Live > Open the DETECTED tab > Find the newly modified strings> Approve them for translation

Remove the old versions of the strings that are no longer needed, i.e.

Visit the Website page where the old versions of the strings were included > Open the approved tab and use the filter “not on page” > Find the strings that are no longer part of this page and remove them.