What are stopwords?

Owned by Damian Rozmiarkowski (Unlicensed)
Last updated: Jul 15, 2024 by Damian Rozmiarkowski
2 min read
@Damian Rozmiarkowski Mar 19, 2025

Introduction

In XTM Cloud, a stopword is one of the popular generic words in particular languages.

Terminology

When it comes to XTM terminology, they are not highlighted blue in XTM Workbench as candidates for terms, to ensure the system’s optimized performance and prevent excess of redundant words/expressions from being highlighted in the editor.

Find attached the file containing all the stopwords (English):

See Stop Words to see all the languages for which XTM Cloud currently supports stopword lists.

Translation memory (TM) matching

Stop words also influence translation memory (TM) matching in the sense that the former do not take part in the process of matching against the source text for Fuzzy Matches if a segment stored in the TM consists of stop words only.

The purpose is to ensure the system’s optimized performance by preventing excess of redundant low-quality TM matches from appearing in XTM Workbench.

IMPORTANT!

A segment is searched only by the expressions which are not stop words!

  1. To visualize it, let’s have an abstract English sentence that consists of stop words only, and translate it in XTM Workbench:

There is nothing here.

There is nothing here.

2024-04-09 11_15_04-Window.png

  1. The segment has been saved in the TM:

2024-04-09 11_13_43-Window.png

  1. Now, create a new project with the very same source text and language combination. An ICE match will appear:

  1. Now, let’s try to obtain a Fuzzy Match by changing the source text a little bit and creating another project with this new source text:

Here is nothing here.

Here is nothing here.

  1. A Fuzzy Match will not appear:

Concordance

Stop words are also not searched via XTM Concordance.

See the following article to learn more about how the Concordance search works: Concordance search.