There are five things you can delete in Universally, and they are not equally risky. Deleting a project or a workspace is permanent. Everything else you can recover from. This page tells you which is which, before you click.
The short version
| What you delete | Can you get it back? | What happens to your word count |
|---|---|---|
| One translation | Yes | Goes down, then back up when the text is translated again |
| Several translations at once | Usually | Same |
| A glossary rule | Yes | No change |
| A language | Yes, add it back | Goes down, comes back with the language |
| A project | No | Goes down and stays down |
| A workspace | No | Goes down and stays down |
The rest of this page is the detail behind each row.
One translation
Deleting a translation clears the translated text and leaves the original string in the list, now marked as untranslated.
The next visitor to that page gets a fresh translation. That is the point: use it when a translation is wrong in a way that editing will not fix.
Editing is usually the better first move, because every version is kept and you can put an old one back. See Edit translations manually.
What it does to your word count
The words come off your project and workspace totals straight away. They are spent again the moment the text is translated afresh.
So deleting on its own does not save you words in the long run. It only does if the text also stops being translated, which means excluding the page, or adding a glossary rule that keeps the text as it is. See Translation rules and Glossary rules.
Several translations at once
Bulk actions deletes either the rows you have ticked or everything your filters match. It only touches the language you are looking at. Other languages keep theirs.
Two things behave differently from deleting one row, and both are worth knowing first.
A string with nothing left in any language disappears completely. Normally deleting a translation leaves the original string behind. But if that was its last translation anywhere, the string goes too. It comes back the next time someone visits the page.
Translations you checked by hand are deleted along with the rest. There is no way to protect them. If a language holds work someone reviewed, either tick the specific rows you mean or narrow the filters first.
The word count behaves exactly as it does for a single translation, above. See Bulk actions.
A glossary rule
Deleting a rule stops it being applied to translation work that has not happened yet. It does not undo the work it already did.
Any wording it produced stays as it is, and cached pages can take up to 24 hours to catch up. If that wording is what you wanted gone, delete or retranslate those strings. See Glossary rules.
A language
The language leaves the project, its URLs stop working, and its words come off your project and workspace totals straight away.
You can undo it. Add the same language back and its old translations come with it, along with their share of the word count, and nothing is spent translating them again.
If you only want to pause a language, disable it instead. That hides it and stops its URLs while keeping the translations and the count, so turning it back on is instant. See Add and remove languages.
A project
Permanent. A project's translations belong to that project, so deleting it throws them away, and there is no way to export them first.
Its words come off the workspace total, which is the only upside. Copy out anything you need beforehand. See Import and export translations for what is and is not possible.
A workspace
Permanent, and bigger than it sounds. Deleting a workspace deletes every project inside it, and every translation those projects had. Billing stops too. See Workspaces.
Two things deleting never does
It does not refund words you have already spent. Your word count shows what is translated right now, so it drops when translations disappear. It is not money back for work already done. See Usage limits.
It does not clear caches. A deleted translation can still appear on your site until the page cache or CDN catches up. See When changes go live.