After creating a Live resource, you can 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 visitors navigate through your web pages outside transifex (in this case, the snippet must 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.
You’ll be asked to log in to Transifex if you're not already logged in. 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, 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 displayed on your webpage.
You can also check if some strings appear not only on this particular webpage but also on other pages - 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 helpful when 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 correct order in the Editor, you should manually approve strings, 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 non-translatable dynamic content (see the section below on ignoring content). Or, if you can edit the HTML, you can mark page elements as non-translatable.
Production/Staging Advanced Settings
Translate tag 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.
If the text in the form is a placeholder that Live does not automatically detect after adding it 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 they can be approved and translated into the project's target languages.
Exclude tag types
If you have HTML tags that you do not want Transifex Live to detect, then the following steps should be followed:
Go to the Transifex Live preview.
Open the Live settings.
Add the tag name to the Exclude tag types field.
Exclude tag classes
If you have CSS classes that you do not want Transifex Live to detect, then the following steps should be followed:
Go to the Transifex Live preview.
Open the Live settings.
Add the classes to the Exclude tag classes field.
HTML tags as blocks
If you have HTML tags that you would like Transifex Live to detect its enclosed content as a single string, then the following steps should be followed:
Go to the Transifex Live preview.
Open the Live settings.
Add the classes to the HTML tags as blocks field.
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 toward your plan’s word count. Visitors will 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 (or the "Approved" tab if you wish to exclude previously approved strings), 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 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 in the Setting URL filters 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.
Any approved strings on that page will be deleted from the approved list and the editor view. However, if a string appears on multiple pages, then this string should remain in the list.
Once an ignored page is restored, all strings should be available for approval under the detected strings list except for those appearing on other pages and already approved for translation (these strings were not removed when the page was ignored).
⚠️Warning: If these strings belong to more pages, we will keep them as part of the approved strings list.
How to remove strings no longer on your website
If some strings are no longer 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.
The "Not on any page" filter returns strings that TX Live has not detected 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 and delete one or more strings.
💡Tip: You can define how many days it will take for a string to be considered "Not on any page" 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 the 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 from the Homepage widget.
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 live 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 do it on a website level.
To do this, 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 quickly 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 the string identifier 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.
The newly modified version of the string can be found under the DETECTED tab as a completely new entry that needs to be approved for translation. Transifex serves translations after the source string is approved, translated, and its translation is finally published.
We suggest you use a staging site to prepare the translations beforehand and ensure your visitors will see your website pages fully translated. 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 quickly be done since Transifex Live allows you to provide both a production and a staging domain for the same Live resource. You also have the option to decide where the translations should be published first - each domain has its own settings in the 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.
💡Tip
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