The third time a WooCommerce update wiped out 120 approved German translations in our Loco Translate PO file, I realized the problem wasn't the sync, it was what happened immediately after. Every time we merged new strings from a plugin update, someone would run a bulk AI translation pass across the entire file, overwriting legally vetted checkout copy and rephrasing brand terms that marketing had locked months ago. We needed a way to resume automation only for the new entries while leaving the stable translations untouched.
The first attempt was manual: export the PO, diff it against the backup, then painstakingly copy-paste only the empty msgstr rows into a separate file for AI processing. This worked, but it turned a 10-minute task into an hour of busywork, and still left room for human error when merging back. The real breakthrough came when I found the Nexu WP Loco AI Auto Translator, which let us scope bulk operations to just the new or fuzzy strings while preserving everything else.
The Core Issue: Syncs Expose Gaps in Workflow
Loco Translate's sync feature is powerful because it forces reconciliation between your local translations and the latest template strings from plugins or themes. But that honesty cuts both ways: it surfaces new msgid entries (the empty rows you should translate) alongside existing translations marked as fuzzy (where the English source changed slightly, like punctuation tweaks). The trap is treating all rows equally.
For example, a WooCommerce payment gateway update might add 50 new strings, most of them harmless admin labels, but a few critical ones like *
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