XLIFF and CSV Export for Professional Translation Workflows

Lang Forge ships professional-grade export and import for translators and agencies. If you work with external translation vendors — or with an internal team that uses translation memory software like Trados, MemoQ, or OmegaT — you need XLIFF.

What is XLIFF?

XLIFF (XML Localization Interchange File Format) is the international standard format for exchanging translatable content between tools. It’s what every serious Translation Management System uses: Trados, MemoQ, Phrase, Smartcat, Lokalise, OmegaT, and dozens of others.

A translation agency will almost always prefer XLIFF over “please translate this WordPress post.” With XLIFF, they can:

• Run your content through their own translation memory
• Apply their glossaries
• Assign the job to their linguists in their usual interface
• Return a finished file you can import in one click

Lang Forge exports XLIFF 1.2, the most widely-supported version.

What Lang Forge exports

From the Tools → Export screen, you can filter by:

• Source language
• Target language (one or multiple at a time)
• Post type
• Post status (published, draft, private)
• Date range
• Category, tag, or taxonomy term
• Translation status (only untranslated, only outdated, everything)

Click Export and you get a single XLIFF file containing every translatable string from every selected post. The file includes:

• Post title, content, excerpt, slug
• ACF Pro fields, including nested repeaters and flexible content
• Field Forge fields
• SEO plugin meta (title, description, focus keyword, OG, Twitter)
• Featured image alt text
• Taxonomy names and descriptions
• Translation memory entries (optional — include your existing TM in the file for your translator’s reference)
• Glossary entries (optional — so the translator respects your terminology)

What Lang Forge imports

Round-trip is the whole point. You export, your translator translates, they send you the file back, you import it.

Import supports:

• XLIFF 1.2 files with any encoding your TMS outputs
• Partial files (a translator returns half the job early — you can import and they keep working on the rest)
• Automatic matching of translated strings to their source posts, even if post IDs have changed
• Conflict detection when a translation already exists and the imported value differs

CSV export for simpler workflows

Not everybody works with an enterprise TMS. If your translation workflow is “my cousin in Berlin does the German translations,” CSV is easier.

Lang Forge exports the same content as CSV with one row per translatable string. Your translator opens it in Excel or Google Sheets, fills in the “translation” column, and sends it back. You import the filled CSV and Lang Forge writes the translations to your database.

Both export formats use UTF-8 and handle every character set WordPress supports.

Translation memory in the export

If you already have translations in your Lang Forge translation memory, you can choose to include them in the XLIFF export so your translator sees existing matches directly in their tool. This dramatically speeds up professional translation workflows and keeps terminology consistent between in-house and agency translations.

Ready to run your translation workflow properly?

Get Lang Forge — from $54/year →

XLIFF 1.2 and CSV export/import are included in every paid plan.