Exclusions
Exclusion rules tell Omnalingo what to skip. You can exclude entire pages or sections of your site by URL, and you can exclude specific elements on a page using CSS selectors. This is useful for content that should always stay in the source language — payment forms, admin tools, live chat widgets, legal notices with jurisdiction-specific language, and so on.
URL Exclusions
Section titled “URL Exclusions”What they do: Stop Omnalingo from scanning entire pages or sections of your site. Excluded URLs are never scanned, so their content never enters the translation database.
How to add one:
- Open Settings → Exclusions.
- In the URL exclusions field, enter one URL or URL pattern per line.
- Save.
Pattern matching: You can use * as a wildcard. For example:
/checkout/— excludes only the exact checkout page/account/*— excludes all pages under/account//wp-admin/*— excludes all WordPress admin pages (though these are already excluded by default)
When to use URL exclusions:
- Payment and checkout pages where you don’t want any text manipulation
- Password-protected or members-only sections you’re not ready to translate
- Landing pages with A/B testing content you want to manage separately
- Any page that third-party scripts own entirely
CSS Selector Exclusions
Section titled “CSS Selector Exclusions”What they do: Skip specific elements within a page during scanning. The matched element and all content inside it are ignored — Omnalingo won’t extract any text from that element.
How to add one:
- Open Settings → Exclusions.
- In the CSS selector field, enter one selector per line.
- Save.
Selector examples:
| Selector | What it excludes |
|---|---|
.no-translate | Any element with that class |
#site-credits | The element with that ID |
code, pre | Code blocks |
[data-no-translate] | Elements with that HTML attribute |
.sidebar .widget-area | Widget areas inside a sidebar |
nav.admin-bar | A specific navigation element |
Default selectors (set automatically on installation):
#wpadminbar— The WordPress toolbar shown to logged-in users. This is handled by WordPress itself and shouldn’t go through Omnalingo..woocommerce-review__author— WooCommerce reviewer display names. These are personal names and should not be translated.
When to use CSS selector exclusions:
- Live chat widgets (the widget container)
- User-generated content (comments, reviews, forum posts)
- Third-party embed containers (maps, booking widgets, social feeds)
- Code samples or technical output that must stay verbatim
- Specific repeated elements like copyright footers
Important: Exclusions Apply at Scan Time
Section titled “Important: Exclusions Apply at Scan Time”Exclusions prevent content from being scanned and added to the database. They do not retroactively remove content that was already scanned before the rule was added.
If you add an exclusion rule for content that was previously scanned:
- The content remains in the database and continues to be served as a translation.
- Future scans will not pick up changes to that content.
- To fully remove already-scanned content, delete the relevant strings from the translation editor.
Exclusions vs. Glossary “Never Translate” Rules
Section titled “Exclusions vs. Glossary “Never Translate” Rules”These two features solve different problems:
| Exclusion Rules | Glossary “Never Translate” | |
|---|---|---|
| Scope | Entire element and all its children | A specific word or phrase |
| Applied at | Scan time — content never enters the database | Translation time — content is scanned but the term is left untranslated in output |
| Best for | Skipping a whole widget, section, or page | Keeping a brand name or code term untranslated within otherwise-translated text |