As your website changes over time, the GDN’s String Activity Tracking feature can help you manage the content currently active on your site. This feature automatically moves old or outdated content to an inactive state, reducing the number of strings displayed in your project, and allowing you to focus on your site’s latest content.
How It Works
With the GDN, your website content is captured and ingested into Smartling when a user or bot accesses your localized website and browses the page. The Strings View of your GDN project lists all strings captured by the GDN in Smartling. Strings authorized for translation will remain in the project indefinitely, regardless of whether they are still used on your source website(s).
The String Activity Tracking feature of the GDN automatically tracks which strings from your source websites have been seen and served on localized sites. Strings that haven't been seen within a specified period can be automatically marked as Inactive. This hides them from the Strings View of your project, helping you focus on management tasks or make decisions regarding content likely to still be on your source websites.
If an Inactive string later reappears on a localized page served by the GDN, it will automatically reactivate. No translations are lost when strings are marked Inactive, but they are removed from any translation job they were previously part of. For example, if old content is later re-added to your site, String Activity Tracking will detect that the strings have already been translated, and the strings will automatically reactivate within minutes.
You can view all Inactive strings, at any time, by using the “State” filter in the Strings View.
How to Enable String Activity Tracking
To enable String Activity Tracking:
- In Smartling, navigate to your GDN project > Settings tab.
- On the left select String Activity Tracking.
- Under Strings Activity Tracking Configuration toggle the Enable Tracking switch ON.
- Under Automatic String Timeout select your desired string timeout period.
- Click Save.
Important Considerations
- String Activity Tracking tracks both GDN strings and strings ingested via Dynamic Content Support.
- The String Activity Tracking feature runs once per day, meaning strings are marked Inactive on a daily basis.
- When a string is marked Inactive it retains its URL/Domain metadata information, translation state (i.e., Published), and string history. However, it will be removed from any job it is currently in.
‣ You can check the string's history to view which Job it was removed from. - If an Inactive string reappears on the source site, it will automatically reactivate. It will not be moved back into its original job.