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If you’re working on a localization project, having access to translation memory software can be really helpful for improving efficiency, ensuring consistency, and reducing costs. However, understanding the scope of what this functionality does can give you an idea of why it’s near necessary for localization.
There’s a lot to get through in this one, including some ‘sojourns’ into brand positioning, the tone of voice of your content, and much more!
Quick Answer: Having the ability to store common words, phrases, and strings that you translate on a regular basis within your database has a lot of benefits for efficiency and consistency. TranslatePress includes translation memory software to assist with this. It runs behind the scenes and makes suggestions when warranted.
What a Translation Memory Is
You can consider all of the translations you store for your WordPress website a database, but a translation memory is essentially a sub-database that stores how you’ve translated certain words or sentences. The idea is that you can easily reuse those translations in places where the same (or nearly identical) word or phrase appears.
For example, if you’re working on localizing a website for your brand, you’ll probably have many words and phrases that appear across multiple pages. Rather than translating them all from scratch each time, your translation memory lets you re-use the saved translations where necessary. It’s a fantastic time saver, but it’s also ideal to boost your consistency.
How you access your translation memory software will depend on your project, site, and toolset. Localizing through TranslatePress means you’ll automatically see suggestions from its memory bank (and you can even have it automatically make the translations for you).
For completely identical strings, TranslatePress will simply pre-fill the translation field. If the translations are similar, TranslatePress will make a suggestion and highlight the differences between the text.
The Benefits of Using Translation Memory for Localization Projects
You might think the same as me: having translation memory software available to you during a localization project is already a big benefit! Even so, it brings along some cumulative benefits that impact the whole.
One of the biggest is ensuring consistency across your project, which can be a common issue with localization. It can even be problematic in a business sense. For instance, take a product or service where you’ve used one translation in the product description and another in its FAQ. Based on the context of the original text, typical machine translation could produce two different results. Your customers might wonder whether you’re talking about separate products.
With multiple team members, external professional translators, a lot of content, and no translation memory software, it can be easy to make these types of mistakes. However, this way, you can guarantee almost complete consistency.
Altogether, this can also help your efficiency, simply because you don’t need to translate everything from scratch. Combining consistency with that efficiency, you should also see a reduction in costs. Spending less on translating your content while still reaping quality output sounds like the biggest benefit to me!
How to Use Translation Memory Software When Localizing WordPress
Of course, you’ll want to make sure that your choice of translation plugin includes translation memory functionality. Not all do, but TranslatePress does: it’s available in both the free version and the premium edition.
All of your translation management happens within a visual, point-and-click Translation Editor. How to translate WordPress and create a multilingual site are beyond the scope of this post, so I recommend you read up on the basics then rejoin me to look at how the memory works in greater detail.
Using TranslatePress’ Translation Memory
It could be that your translation memory needs enabling. To do this, head to the Settings → TranslatePress screen within WordPress. Next, navigate to the Advanced → Miscellaneous options tab and scroll to find the Automatic Translation Memory checkbox:
Although TranslatePress will pre-fill the translation for you once it’s active, you can still edit it from the Translation Editor:
For near identical translations, you’ll instead see a suggested translation, information on how similar the translations are, and the highlighted differences:
To use the version from memory, simply click it and TranslatePress will automatically add it to the translation field.
This can be especially helpful if you’re using a machine translation service such as Google Translate or DeepL to translate your site. In short, you can still manually refine the automatic translations and take advantage of all the other functionality TranslatePress has to offer. TranslatePress AI also makes use of the translation memory, while also removing the need for an API.
Finally, if you have a developer on your team, you could even use PHP filters to adjust the required similarity percentage. For example, you could set things up to only trigger the memory for phrases that are 98 percent similar instead of the default.
How Translation Memory Handles Content Updates
When you edit a string in your default language, TranslatePress treats the updated text as a new string. The existing front-end translation stops displaying on the site until the updated version has a translation of its own.
This is expected behaviour, but it doesn’t mean starting over. The translation memory is built to handle this kind of change. I’ve already talked about the translation memory in general terms, but next, I want to get into more technical detail about what happens under the hood.
What TranslatePress does when a string changes
When you open an updated string in the Translation Editor, TranslatePress searches your entire translation history and surfaces the closest match as a suggestion. This includes translations no longer active on the front end.
The similarity score and the differences between the old and updated string are both visible, so you can judge whether to accept the suggestion, edit it, or retranslate.
For a routine edit, you’ll often see a match high enough to accept with a single click. In these situations, the translation can go live without any further work.
How automatic translation memory handles minor edits
If Automatic Translation Memory is enabled and an edit amounts to less than 5 percent of the total string length, it keeps the assigned and existing translation without any intervention from you. This covers a range of content changes that are common on any live site:
- Corrected typos or grammar fixes, where the meaning stays the same and the change is small relative to the total string length.
- Reworded sentences within longer strings, where enough of the surrounding content stays the same for the memory to carry the existing translation forward.
- Updated dates or figures, where a single word or number changes but the rest of the string is unchanged.
For sites with shared content patterns, updates can accumulate quickly. Consider an e-commerce site where product descriptions follow the same structure, or a services site where pricing language repeats across pages.
Without translation memory, every edited string is a retranslation task across every active language. However, with the translation memory, the majority of minor changes are resolved in the background.
Translation memory also runs before automatic translation in TranslatePress. This means if a string is already covered by the memory, the automatic translation engine isn’t called at all. The upside for you is that no translation words are consumed for strings the translation memory already handles.
How to Use Translation Memory for Brand Terminology
Many standalone translation tools ask you to build a glossary before you start, so you can define approved translations for key terms upfront and apply them consistently. TranslatePress takes an approach that arguably suits a WordPress workflow better: rather than a separate configuration step, it builds your brand terminology record as you translate.
TranslatePress Multilingual
So, every string you approve in the Translation Editor becomes part of that record. If you translate a product name, a recurring CTA, or a phrase central to your brand voice in a particular way, the translation memory stores that choice and applies it site-wide from then on.
The order in which you translate matters more than most people realise. Putting your most-used brand strings into the memory first (such as product names, taglines, repeated CTAs, and shared phrases) means those choices are in place before automatic translation runs on the rest of your site.
Once a string is in the translation memory, TranslatePress can draw from it rather than generating a new translation each time. That consistency even carries over to pages you’ve never opened in the Translation Editor. Of course, future content is also covered: any new page that includes a phrase already in your memory will have it translated correctly from the first time a visitor loads it.
Protecting terms that should never be translated
You’ll likely have some terms that shouldn’t be translated at all. This could be brand names, product names, proprietary slogans, or industry terms your audience already knows in the source language. For these, TranslatePress gives you a dedicated way to manage those exclusions.
To access this, head to Settings → TranslatePress → Advanced. Here, click the Exclude strings and pages tab to see a host of sections and fields to use:
This is useful for a number of words, phrases, and strings:
- Brand and product names that need to stay identical in every language.
- Proprietary terms or taglines where a translation would change the intended meaning.
- Industry terms that your audience already recognizes in the source language.
In a nutshell, strings you include on the list remain in their original form in every language, while the surrounding content translates normally.
Building brand voice into the translation memory through refinement
When using TranslatePress, your brand voice can build through the corrections you make over time which is a step up from simple ‘term’ protection. When automatic or machine translation produces a result that’s too literal, the wrong register, or a phrase that works in isolation but not in context, you correct it in the Translation Editor.
After confirming and storing this manual translation, the memory then treats it as the reference for any similar string going forward. So, a single correction in the right place can lift consistency across multiple pages without you having to find and fix each instance.
FAQ
Before I wrap up, let’s go through some of the more common questions that come up when discussing translation memory software. If you have others, feel free to drop them in the comments section at the end of the post and we’ll look to answer them!
Does translation memory work with TranslatePress AI and automatic translation?
Yes, and the two systems work together. The translation memory runs first, so if a string closely matches one already in the memory, it uses that directly from the database. The automatic translation engine isn’t called at all for strings the translation memory, which means no TranslatePress AI words are consumed for them.
Can I edit a string that the translation memory applied automatically?
Every translation in TranslatePress is editable. When you save a change and TranslatePress marks it as manually confirmed, it becomes the new memory reference for similar strings going forward.
What is the best way to start building a translation memory in TranslatePress?
It’s a good idea to begin with the strings that appear most often across your site, such as navigation labels, Call to Action (CTA) text, product names, and recurring template phrases. Translating these first populates the memory with your most important choices before automatic translation runs on the rest of your content. From there, enable Automatic Translation Memory so TranslatePress can apply those references to similar strings as your site grows.
TranslatePress’ Translation Memory Will Help Speed Up Your Next Localization Project
When you’re working on a localization project, being able to access translation memory software can help maintain consistency, improve efficiency, and reduce the cost of your project. This lets you automatically translate similar or identical words and phrases, safe in the knowledge that you’re not impacting accuracy.
TranslatePress offers a built-in translation memory, which works only on near-identical words and phrases. However, with some potential tinkering, you could set this up to run for any point of accuracy. Much like most of TranslatePress’ other helpful functionality, there’s a minimum of necessary engagement to set things up and begin translating your site.
TranslatePress Multilingual
How will a translation memory help you complete your next localization project? Let me know in the comments section below!
