Tags are the formatting and structural markers embedded in a source file — things like bold or italic formatting, hyperlinks, or the structural markup that lets an application like a CMS or a mobile app read the file correctly. When a file is loaded into wxrks, those tags come along with the text and need to make it into your translation in the right place, or the final file can end up broken.
💡 Who is this for? Anyone translating or reviewing content in the wxrks Editor where the source file contains formatting or structural tags — most commonly HTML, XML, DOCX, and similar structured file types.
What are tags, and why do they matter
A tag is metadata embedded in a file's content, separate from the words themselves. Common reasons a file has tags include:
Formatting, such as bold, italic, or superscript text
Hyperlinks that need to keep pointing to the right URL
Structural markers that an application needs in order to parse the file correctly (for example, XML element tags)
In an XML file, certain characters have special meaning — a literal < inside an XML element, for instance, would be misread as the start of a new element. To avoid that, source files replace those characters with entity references like <, which wxrks displays and lets you work with normally, converting them back correctly when the file is exported.
Entity reference | Character | Meaning |
< | < | Less than |
> | > | Greater than |
& | & | Ampersand |
⚠️ A few tag types are safe to drop without breaking the file or its formatting. But as a general rule, every tag in the source should also appear in your translation, in the same relative position.
Turning on Expanded Tags
wxrks can display tags two ways in the Editor. By default, a tag shows only its index number — telling you the order tags should appear in, but not what each one actually is:
Turning on Expanded Tags shows what each tag actually is (for example, <b> or <a href="...">) right inside the tag itself, which makes it much easier to tell where a tag belongs and what happens if you get it wrong. We recommend keeping this on while translating anything with tags.
To turn it on: open the Editor's Show/Hide menu icon in the top bar, click the Settings icon in the panel that slides out, then find Expanded Tags under Viewing Preferences:
With it on, the same segment's tags now show their actual content:
Tag mismatches
If your translation is missing a tag the source has (or has one the source doesn't), wxrks warns you when you try to confirm the segment:
From here you can Cancel to go back and fix the tags, or Confirm to save the segment anyway and ignore the mismatch. Since a missing tag can affect formatting, links, or in some cases how the final file opens at all, only ignore the warning when you're confident the tag genuinely doesn't apply — for example, a formatting tag that has no equivalent in the target language.
⚠️ A project's translation settings can hide this warning going forward, but tag mismatches still show up when you run the QA Check tool, so a hidden warning doesn't mean the mismatch is gone.
Fixing missing tags
You have a few ways to add a missing tag back into your translation:
Drag and drop the missing tag from the source into the correct position in the target text. This works whether one or both tags in a pair are missing, and it's the only reliable option when just one side of a pair (only the opening or only the closing tag) is missing.
Use the keyboard shortcut Ctrl+B (or Cmd+B on Mac) to automatically insert every tag that's missing from the target. This only works when both tags in a pair are missing — it appends them rather than placing them mid-sentence, so you'll likely still need to drag them into the right position afterward:
Use Fix Tags from the Augmented Actions menu, when it's available for the segment, to have wxrks reposition missing tags automatically.
Takeaways
Tags should always carry over from source to target, except in the rare case where a formatting tag genuinely doesn't apply to the target language.
A missing tag can affect formatting, links, or the file itself — wxrks always warns you before you confirm a segment with a mismatch.
Turning on Expanded Tags makes it much easier to see what each tag is and where it belongs.
You can fix a missing tag by dragging it into place, using Ctrl+B/Cmd+B when both tags in a pair are missing, or using Fix Tags from Augmented Actions.
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