Is it safe to remove all untranslated strings?

Question

I have a site which contains thousand of unused (and not translated) strings.

I would like to remove them to light up my database.

For the records,those strings where created because the original language of the source files has changed and because of some ugly code like t("$variable" bla bla")

My idea is to remove all the untranslated strings (which will contain used string) because the used strings will be auto-repopulated when needed. Here is the code I plan to use:

  $locale_storage = \Drupal::service('locale.storage');
  $strings = $locale_storage->getStrings(['translated' => FALSE);
  foreach ($strings as $string){
    $string_to_del = $locale_storage->findString(['source' => $string->getString()]);
    $locale_storage->delete($string_to_del);
  }

Is it safe?

Answer 1

Instead of a one-time deletion, I would periodically export your important strings to code. This is easy to script and means you will always have a backup if deletion goes wrong or a translator makes a mistake. Drush makes it easy.

Export strings as PO files with Drush

You can remove all untranslated strings with a DB command but I would back up your translated strings first, specifically your customized strings:

Use drush locale:export to export strings to a PO file for each language:

drush locale:export ja --types=customized > translations/en.po

You could try keeping the not-customized strings as well, but since those are imported from drupal.org, you probably don't need to back them up.

You can then commit these .po files to your git repo to have a backup of the strings in the database.

Wipe all strings

See how to bulk delete translation strings.

Re-import the customized strings

Use drush locale:import:

drush locale:import en translations/en.po --type=customized --override=customized

Additional resource

If the drush locale commands aren't sufficient, the Drush language commands module adds some more useful stuff.