How can I remove inactive translations?

In this article, you'll see how to find out if you have some inactive translations, why, and how to remove them in order to reduce your word count

1. Why do I have inactive translations and where do they come from?
2. Where can I find those inactive translations?
3. How can I remove those translations?

1. Why do I have inactive translations, and where do they come from?

When a translation hasn't been used on a page for a while compared to the rest of the translations on that page, Weglot will detect it, mark the translation as "inactive", and display a helpful indicator. 

Usually, that happens when you edit your  original content since it will no longer match the existing translations. You can find more information about it in this article: What happens if I change the original content of my website?

It can also happen when content is dynamically generated. For example, "Today is January 4th" might get translated on the day but end up as "inactive" a few days after the fact. In this case, you should probably create a variable to avoid Weglot creating one translation each time. With a variable, one translation only will be used for every translation that can match the variable translation. You can find more information about the variables in this article: How can I add variables to my translations?

After some time (especially if you change your website often), you can end up with a significant amount of old sentences that are unused and taking up space and words in your Weglot account. You'll then have to delete them manually. This is usually safe to do, but make sure you don't lose manually translated content as you might want to keep around, as being "inactive" is only an indicator.  

2. Where can I find those inactive translations?

First of all, go into your Weglot dashboard > Translations > Translations list and click on "See your inactive translations":

You'll see an interface that shows all your translated language(s) and the number of potential inactive words you have for each language(s) like this:

From this page, you can click on one of these blue numbers, it will bring you to your Translation List and show you all the related translations. You can also click on the Trash bin icon in order to mass delete all the inactive translations once you've made sure you want to delete them. 

You can easily spot them as you'll notice an icon ⚠️ below each one:

3. How can I remove those translations?

First, if you want to make sure the translations are inactive, you can visit the associated URL of the translations (in your translated version)
In order to do that, you can follow the steps in the previous part above and then visit the page where the translations are located if the "Last seen date" doesn't change  within the next 48 hours, and the translation is still tagged as inactive, it means that you can delete it.

Otherwise, you can follow this method to synchronize your URLs

Once you are sure that you want to delete your translation(s), you can either:

I. Remove all inactive translations in a language pair at once:

From the previously mentioned "Inactive translations" screens, you can click the trash bin on the right to get the choice to delete either:

• All inactive translations, including the ones that have been manually reviewed or edited. 
• All automatic inactive translations, which is safer since these will be regenerated as-is if the sentences ever come back. 

II. Remove multiple translations at once:

• Use the bulk selection, check the checkbox in the top bar
• Then click on "Select all"
• And click on the trash icon at the bottom right

III. Remove them individually

• Next to each translation, you have a trash icon
• Click on it (at the right of each translation you want to delete)
• Note that you can use the search bar at the top to find the translation easily you would like to remove