See the Document While You Translate It
Translating a Word document segment by segment has always meant imagining the finished page. That guesswork ends in this release. The Wordbee Editor now shows a live preview of Word documents in a panel below the grid, exactly as the file will be delivered, with colors, images, and layout included. It redraws on every keystroke, so a heading that runs too long or a table cell that overflows is visible the moment it happens rather than after delivery. You can move or detach the panel, click any paragraph to jump to its segment, switch between source and target, and see at a glance what is still untranslated. You can also download the preview from the panel. Live preview covers Word .docx files, and other formats keep the existing preview.
The Editor also keeps segment status honest. When you edit the text of a target language that is Confirmed (green), that language now resets to Neutral (gray), so the new wording has to be confirmed again before it counts as done. Only the edited language resets; the segment's other languages and the source are untouched. If you deliberately set a status in the same action, your choice wins. The same rule applies to repeats updated by auto-propagation and to segment updates made through the API, so a confirmed status always means someone confirmed the current text.
A Clear Definition of Done
Status only helps if it can be trusted, and this release gives project managers a firm way to enforce it. A new optional workflow setting, "Jobs can only be completed when all editable segments are confirmed with green status", stops a linguist from marking a job complete while any segment they can edit is still red, gray, or untranslated. It sits next to the existing error-free QA option in the Workflow & Suppliers step settings, is off by default, and works for Standard and Codyt jobs. Locked and read-only segments are never counted, so nobody is blocked by content they cannot change. When completion is blocked, the message says how many segments still need confirming, and in the Editor the "All editable segments confirmed" checklist row offers an Apply filter button that jumps straight to them. Users with the Administrator profile are exempt from this rule and, from this release, also from the error-free QA rule. The workflow template automation options explain both settings, and our workflows overview shows where they fit.
Finished work now stays finished. Suppliers can no longer decline a Completed Codyt job, or a Standard job that is Completed, Approved, or Closed; previously declining at that stage emptied the job and reset it to Draft even after delivery and invoicing. The restriction is enforced when the action is submitted, not just hidden on screen. Project managers are now always notified when a supplier declines, with or without a typed reason. And the QA Spelling rule finally respects a disabled spellcheck dictionary, so a dictionary an administrator switched off no longer flags words in QA reports.
Measure the Work Where It Happens
Knowing how much editing a job really took is central to pricing, supplier evaluation, and understanding the value of machine translation. A job's edit-effort figure now counts exactly the editing done inside that job, whoever did it and however it was allocated. Previously the figure was matched to the assigned person, so a job outsourced to a supplier company showed a blank and a job shared by two people counted only one. Every segment save now records the job it was made under, so jobs allocated to a supplier company or an AI agent supplier produce a percentage, reassigned jobs count everyone's work, and repeat jobs on the same document stay separate. Text written outside any job, such as machine translation and pre-translation, is not counted as editing. The measure applies to jobs created from this release onward, as explained in the job edit distance documentation.
Reports got more accurate too. In report S411, "Last approved" now shows when results were actually approved rather than when the job was completed, and a new "Job Total Time Spent" column shows how long each job took, formatted to sort and filter in Excel. In report S721, "Job types" now lists the task categories involved, and a new "Order ID" column shows the orders a project came from. Both new columns sit at the far right, so existing column positions are unchanged. See the S411 report page for the full column list, or our reports overview for what else you can track.
Two more changes make job history easier to reach. The job status in the Standard and Codyt job lists is now clickable and opens the status history popup, so you can see when a job changed status and who changed it without opening each job. For integrators, a new endpoint in the Wordbee API returns, in a single call, the jobs linked to each file of a project, with target language and status, instead of one request per job. Alongside it, the job word counts list no longer returns rows for clients a restricted user is not assigned to.
Files That Come Back Intact
Delivery is where every earlier step pays off, and three fixes protect it. Line breaks (Shift+Enter) in Word files produced by generating tools rather than by Word itself are now picked up, shown in the Editor, and restored in the translated file, instead of sentences arriving joined together; affected documents need to be uploaded again to benefit. Excel files translated between left-to-right and right-to-left languages now open without needing repair, with cell formatting, comments, and target-language alignment preserved. And a single stray formatting character inside a stored translation can no longer make finalizing, segment export, offline export, MT Hive translation, or document preview fail outright; the affected text is written out as plain text and every other segment is unchanged.
Also in This Release
When you edit an outsourced project whose supplier has a Default client pricelist configured, the pricelist dropdown now offers only that pricelist, plus the project's current one if it differs. That removes the risk of saving a different rate card by accident and quietly changing what the client is billed, and aligning a project becomes a deliberate choice. When the supplier has no configured pricelist, the full list is still offered and the form explains why.
The full technical notes for 2026.3.13.0 live on help.wordbee.com, with configuration steps for each item. If the new completion rule or per-job edit effort could change how your team measures quality, talk to our team and we will walk you through the setup.