Orphan Management

What Is an Orphan?

An orphan is a translated string that no longer has a matching source string on the page. This happens when you edit a page and the original text changes, when a section is deleted, or when a theme or plugin update changes its wording.

For example: your About page originally said “We’ve been crafting furniture since 1987.” You had that translated into French. Later you edited the page to read “We’ve been crafting furniture since 1992.” Omnalingo now sees a new string on the page — and the old French translation no longer has anything to attach to. The old translation becomes an orphan.

Orphans are a normal consequence of content evolving over time. Omnalingo handles most cases automatically, and gives you tools to deal with the rest.

How Omnalingo Handles Changed Content Automatically

When you scan a page after editing it, Omnalingo compares what it finds now against what it found before. If a string has disappeared and a new, similar string has appeared in its place, Omnalingo runs a similarity check:

Very high similarity (for example, a typo fix or a minor wording change): the old translation is automatically carried over to the new string. You won’t see anything in the editor — it just works.
Moderate similarity (for example, a sentence restructured but recognisably the same): the old translation is carried over but flagged for review. In the visual editor, these strings show a yellow Needs Review banner alongside both the old and new source text, so you can decide whether the translation still fits.
Low similarity or no match: the old string becomes an orphan. The new string starts without a translation.

This means that after most routine content edits, your translations are preserved or at least given a head start.

Viewing Orphans in the Visual Editor

When you open a page in the visual editor, any orphaned strings appear in a Previously Found section at the bottom of the sidebar. These strings are no longer present on the page, so they can’t be clicked in the preview, but you can see their original text and any translation that was attached to them.

What to Do with Orphans

Delete them

If the original text is gone for good (the page was rewritten or the content was removed), delete the orphan using the delete button next to it in the Previously Found section. This removes the string and its translations from all languages permanently.

Leave them for now

If you’re not sure whether the old translation is still useful, you can leave the orphan in place. It won’t appear on your live site — it’s only visible in the editor.

Review flagged strings

If a string is showing a Needs Review banner, click it in the sidebar and check whether the carried-over translation still makes sense for the new source text. Make any needed edits and save — this clears the review flag and marks the string as human-reviewed.

When Do Orphans Appear?

Orphans appear after:

Editing the text on a page (any change to wording creates a new string)
Deleting a page or section
Installing a theme or plugin update that changes its own wording
Moving content from one page to another

They are not a sign that anything is broken. They are Omnalingo’s way of surfacing the gap between your old translations and your new content.

Bulk Cleanup

There is no bulk “delete all orphans” button. The normal way to clear orphans across your whole site is to run a full rescan. During rescanning, untranslated orphans (strings that were never translated) are cleaned up automatically. Translated orphans go through the similarity check and are either carried over, flagged for review, or left as previously found strings for you to handle manually.

If the Previously Found list on a page is very long, it’s a sign that the page has changed substantially since the last scan. Running a rescan from the dashboard will process those strings and clear out the ones with no translations.