There may be occasions when you need to make a change to your translations upon downloading the translated file, without updating the translations in the Translation Memory or anywhere on the Smartling dashboard. Such changes could include updating a single word or phrase, an entire string or block of text, or even a URL, similarly to performing a find and replace all within the translated file.

With File Rewrite Rules, Account Owners can define changes to be applied to translations for any language, within any file-based project in your account, translating in any of the supported file types.

If your translated file contains a URL, such as www.yourcomany.com, to protect the URL, the Smartling CAT Tool does not allow linguistics to edit a URL, but does allow them to place the URL in the correct position of the translation. Using File Rewrite Rules, you can create a rule that rewrites www.yourcompany.com to www.yourcompany.fr in French translated files, www.yourcompany.de in German translated files, etc. See how to create this rule below.

The rewrite is only visible in the downloaded supported file type, and not anywhere in the Smartling Dashboard. The rewrite is visible in pseudo, current and published file downloads. You can download the file from within the Job Details, from the Files tab, or via the API. The File Rewrite Rule must be created before downloading the file.

There is a limit of 1000 rules per account.

In cases where you want to create the one File Rewrite Rule to be applied to some or all languages, you can save time and effort by using the available variables:

To save time and effort in identifying each Rewrite Rule with a unique ID, Smartling automatically creates a unique Rule ID for each File Rewrite Rule create. This way you can quickly identify a rule, and if needed, reference this ID both internal and external communication.

You can locate any rule quickly and easily by using the following search and filters:

Click the ellipses (3 dots) beside each File Rewrite Rule to complete any of the following actions, or you can also choose to carry out bulk actions by multi-selecting File Rewrite Rules and click the Actions button:

Always test any rule you create before implementing it with real content. Just as with any "Find & Replace All" action, Rewrite Rules are a powerful function that could potentially destroy your content if implemented without proper testing. Consider any possible corruption to the JSON or HTML in your content, including translatable HTML values in <tags>. As mentioned below, only translatable content can be rewritten, so keys shouldn’t be affected; however, testing is always recommended.

For most file formats, only the translatable content from the file is rewritten - with the exception of URLs from docx, xlsx, pptx files.

It is not possible to rewrite file attributes, such as tags, as Smartling does not ingest native tags from files, such as with XLIFF files.

The content rewrite process is designed to access text within HTML tags. Please be aware that if the same text appears inside HTML tags, it may also be picked up and modified by file rewrite rules. To avoid this, we recommend using matches that do not include any content that matches the text inside HTML tags, or changing the content inside the tags (such as words or class names) to be unique so they are not accidentally matched by a rewrite rule. Another alternative would be to add a term to your glossary instead of using file rewrite rules.