Uploaded source files sometimes carry a typo, a wrong term, or leftover formatting cruft that needs fixing before a project moves forward — but re-uploading the whole file just to fix one sentence is wasteful, and editing the target text won't help if the source itself is wrong. Source editing lets you correct the source-side text of a segment directly inside the Editor, without touching the original uploaded file: your correction is saved as a separate modified source, exports pick it up automatically, and you can revert to the original at any time.
​

💡 Who is this for? This guide is for anyone whose Permission Group includes Edit Source Segments — typically Vendors making a hands-on correction while translating or reviewing, and Account Admins deciding who should be allowed to make that correction.

Original file: the file exactly as it was uploaded. Editing source text never changes it — it's always available for download, untouched.
​

Modified source: the corrected version of a segment's source text, saved alongside the original. Once a segment has a modified source, exports and the Modified Source File download use it in place of the original text for that segment.
​

Placeholder: an inline tag standing in for formatting, a link, or another non-text element from the original file (shown in the Editor as a small numbered chip, e.g. 1 <b> ... 1 </b>). Placeholders have to stay in the source when you edit around them — see Placeholder rules below.

Source editing is gated behind a single permission — Edit Source Segments — and it isn't included in any role's Permission Group by default. An Account Admin has to add it explicitly, from Organizations > Permission Groups, to whichever group should be allowed to edit source text (typically a Vendor-facing group, since this is usually a linguist- or reviewer-level correction). Until it's added there, the edit option below simply won't appear for that user — there's no separate per-project toggle to turn on.
​

Editing a specific segment also requires it to be unlocked and not yet reviewed — a locked or already-reviewed segment hides the edit option even for a user who has the permission.

Hover over a segment's source text in the Editor. A small pencil icon — Edit source placeholders — appears above it if you have permission to edit that segment's source. Click it to turn the source text into an editable field in place:

Make your correction, then click Save source (the floppy-disk icon) to commit it, or Cancel source edit (the X icon) to back out without saving. A confirmation toast ("Source updated") appears once the save goes through.

After saving, the segment picks up a small Modified source badge above its source text, and a new Revert modified source icon appears next to the edit pencil — both visible on hover, same as the edit icon itself:

Click Revert modified source at any point to discard the correction and return the segment to its originally-parsed source text — this is a normal, reversible action, not something that needs confirmation from anyone else.
​

One thing to plan around: if a segment's source is corrected in an early workflow step (e.g. Translation), that correction carries forward into later steps (Review, DTP, and so on) for the same segment automatically — but only if the later step hasn't already made its own separate source edit. A later step's own edit is never silently overwritten by an earlier one.

You can freely edit the words around a placeholder — fix spelling, punctuation, wording, reorder sentences — but the placeholder chips themselves have to stay in the text, in the same relative order, with none added or removed. They represent real structure from the original file (a formatting tag, a link, a merge field), so deleting one would corrupt that structure in every exported file downstream.
​

[SCREENSHOT PLACEHOLDER: the Editor's actual response to a save that removes or reorders a placeholder — e.g. a rejected save or an error toast.] The existing help content describes this as a hard rule enforced by the Editor at save time; this pass wasn't able to automate a reliable reproduction of that exact save-time response to confirm and screenshot it directly, so that specific detail is carried over from the previous version of this article rather than freshly verified.

The Editor's Download menu has separate options for the untouched upload and the corrected version:

Bilingual exports — XLSX, XLIFF, TMX, and Loc-kit — automatically use each segment's modified source where one exists, and the original source everywhere else. There's no separate export setting to turn this on: a segment either has a saved source edit or it doesn't, and the export follows whichever is true.

The edit option doesn't appear on a segment: confirm your Permission Group includes Edit Source Segments, and that the segment itself isn't locked or already reviewed — any one of the three blocks the option.
​

An export still shows the original text after a source edit: confirm the segment was actually saved (not just typed into and left open), and that you're exporting the workflow step or work units that contain that segment.

wxrks Editor — a full tour of the Editor this feature lives in.
​wxrks Editor Menu for Vendors — where the source-text actions sit relative to the rest of the Editor's vendor-facing menu.
​How to export and import a bilingual XLSX file in wxrks — where modified source text shows up in an offline export.
​Understanding Steps in wxrks Workflows — what "an earlier workflow step" means for how a source edit carries forward above.