This paper investigates under which conditions transitions can be removed from an automaton while preserving important synthesis properties. The work is part of a framework for compositional synthesis of least restrictive controllable and nonblocking supervisors for modular discrete event systems. The method for transition removal complements previous results, which are largely focused on state merging. Issues concerning transition removal in synthesis are discussed, and redirection maps are introduced to enable a supervisor to process an event, even though the corresponding transition is no longer present in the model. Based on the results, different techniques are proposed to remove controllable and uncontrollable transitions, and an example shows the potential of the method for practical problems.