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New and Improved Advanced Translation Editor is Here!

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The new version of WPML’s Advanced Translation Editor works and looks better. It provides a streamlined interface, the ability to edit paragraphs as single items, easier translation of links, and more.

Besides the new design and improvements, this prepares the editor for great new features coming in WPML 4.7 – our upcoming big release.

What’s New in the Advanced Translation Editor

The new Advanced Translation Editor is already enabled on all sites. Here are the top updates and features.

Revamped Interface and Easier to Use

Besides updated design, the new Advanced Translation Editor improves experience with a clear interface and better tooltips. We also added a dark mode (turn it on in the editor’s settings).

Revamped interface

New dark mode

Edit Paragraphs as Single Items

One of the questions we often get is why paragraphs are broken into separate sentences. While you can manually join sentences together, we realized it’s not the most intuitive approach.

This is why the new Advanced Translation Editor does this for you by default. A paragraph now appears as a single item with multiple sentences. In other words, you edit a paragraph as a whole.

Translating a paragraph as a single item in the new Advanced Translation Editor

An added benefit of this change is improved automatic translation. This is because now, AI translates the whole paragraph as one item and more sentences provide it with more context which is crucial for accurate translations.

Easy Link Translation

The new Advanced Translation Editor makes link translation super easy:

  • Most of the links now display inline and you translate them with the rest of the content
  • Some special types of links appear as separate segments

But most importantly, you don’t need to search for links anymore to be able to translate them.

Easy link translation using the new Advanced Translation Editor

Want to Use the Previous Version?

If you want, you can revert to the old Advanced Translation Editor. Simply go to the editor, click the cog icon in the top right corner of the screen, and toggle the option to use the previous version. 

You can also disable the bigger segments option if you prefer to translate paragraphs as separate sentences.

Options to switch back to the old version and separate paragraphs into sentences

The old version of the editor will be available for some time but will eventually be phased out.

Still Using the Classic Translation Editor?

If you’re still using our old Classic Translation Editor now is a great time to switch. The Advanced Translation Editor provides many more features and now, it comes with the same simplicity.

The top features you are missing without the Advanced Translation Editor:

Safe editing that cannot break your site

Glossary for both manual and automatic translation

Top-of-the-class AI translations

Translation memory that saves you time and money

Spellchecker

And more…

Coming soon

Ready for Better Than Human Translations? WPML AI is Coming

As mentioned in the introduction, this new version of the Advanced Translation Editor is setting the scene for some ground-breaking features coming to WPML. 

One of the biggest is Better Than Human Translation – a combination of a new AI translation engine and your own AI assistant called Maiya.

Maiya will analyze your content, ask you some questions, and help you take your automatic translations to the next (ultimate) level.

Here’s a glimpse of how effortlessly it will work.

AI assistant Maiya in action

Excited about the New and Coming Features?

We’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments about this update and your own experience with the Advanced Translation Editor.

18 Responses to “New and Improved Advanced Translation Editor is Here!”

  1. That’s interesting. Three questions:

    1) Does this mean that it’s also going to be possible to edit professional translations in the ATE?

    2) Why would this improve translation? It seems logical that the context of an AI translation is the entire page that is being send for translation. Not each sentence or paragraph on it’s own. For example, if I need to translate a document, I paste the entire text in the Deepl app and it translates it as a whole, using the complete text as a context.

    3) How does the ‘Bigger segments’ relate to the translation memory and credit usage? Let’s say I have one with two paragraphs, with 5 sentences of 10 words each, so each paragraph has 50 words and the contains 100 words. How many words will be calculated if I change a single word in one sentence? Should it be just 1 word, 10 words of the changed sentence, 50 words of the changed paragraph or all 100 words in the same ? I just tested twice, for the first test it calculated all 100 words of the and the second test it calculate only 10 words of the changed sentence.

    Thanks
    JP

    • Hi JP,
      Thanks for all of your questions. To answer them:
      1. You can’t edit translations created by a professional translation service, but you can add a professional as a translator to your site and send the content to them. When they take the job, it will open in the Advanced Translation Editor. Alternatively, if you’re translating everything automatically, you can have a professional translator review and edit translations in the editor.
      2. As I’ve been informed by our development team, this is a complex topic. Content divided into bigger segments vs. smaller segments matters, even when the entire page is sent for translation. This is because of how machine translation systems process and use context. Most machine translation models have a limited context window. While the entire page might be sent for translation, the model processes it in chunks that fit within its context window. Also, references, pronouns, and terminology are better understood and translated within the scope of a paragraph. And finally, how exactly better context is applied would depend on the particular translation engine.
      3. Bigger segments don’t change anything in relation to translation memory, credit usage, and pricing. Existing translation memory should not be affected, and it’s still going to be applied in the same situations as before. When the original content in a “big segment” is changed, some of its parts with the changed content will have to be re-translated using automatic translation, and the Advanced Translation Editor will be able to apply translation memory to the rest of the content.

      • Thank you for your detailed reply Kathy.

        1. Sorry, I meant translations done though the connections with a translation service. They are currently stored in the format of the classic translation editor. I asked before to get them in the ATE and WPML’s translation manager to make it easier to edit minor changes, and hoped this was the first step towards that. Adding a professional translator would be possible, but won’t work with these translation services, as they use their own software and workflow to assign the jobs.

        3. That doesn’t really answer the question. It suggests it changes and calculates the words of only the sentence with the change, but in my first test it calculated the entire text block. Shall I open a ticket for this to be looked into?

        Thanks.
        JP

        • Hi JP,

          1. Unfortunately, it’s not possible to open translations done through a translation service in ATE.
          3. Thanks for clarifying – I understand now. Yes, please kindly open a ticket in our Support forum.

  2. I have actually a lot of translations to do, the new feature to edit paragraphs is very good news, but where can i download the version 4.7? i can not find it.

    Greetings,
    Peter

    • Hi Peter,

      WPML 4.7 is still in development. The new and improved Advanced Translation Editor is already enabled on all sites, and you can now use many features like easier link translation and editing paragraphs as a whole. Once WPML 4.7 is released, there will be even more features for you to enjoy.

  3. Hi, thanks for your pligin, which has been very useful to me.
    My posts and pages have a lot of links, references to support the conclusions.
    An example is this post – https://healthviafood.org/compatible-eating/
    At the end of the post, you can see the section, “References”, with a series of links to books, other websites, videos, and so on.
    I would like to systematically exclude this section from automatic translation.
    In other words, I would like to prevent translation of these sections, turning off WMPL without havving to process each sentence manually?
    Is this possible?
    I have the impression that it is not, but I wish it were.
    Thanks again for WPML and for updating it.
    Regards,
    Ben

    • Hi Ben,
      Thanks for getting in touch. Unfortunately, it’s not possible to exclude a section on a post or page from automatic translation. If you have individual words or terms you don’t want to translate, you can add them as names to the glossary. However, this wouldn’t be a solution in the case of your References section, which varies from page to page.

  4. I am facing issues with the new translation version. Some permalinks have been changed due to the translation without authorization and now I have a big problem with broken links. I need some help re-establishing the website. Please send me any solution to get the website version. It is hurting our PPC campaign.

    Thanks in advance

    Diana

    • Hi Diana,
      I’m sorry to hear about this experience. Please open a ticket in our support forum. Our team will be able to look at your site and help you with the issue.

  5. The improved advanced editor is great step forward. Just one thing that is step back….

    When translating the image data, it does not copy the finished translation to the other fields. The old version pre-filled the next fields if they were identical (Title, Caption, Description, Alt-Text). I only had to approve the translation, now I have to copy paste each of them.

    • Hi John,

      Thanks for getting in touch! While this is is a feature from the last version of the Advanced Translation Editor that is not implemented in this new version, I’ve spoken to our development team and they’ve confirmed that we are going to add this capability to the new Advanced Translation Editor soon.

  6. We found a bug which started today, we are currently migration a large website and could pinpoint the error to following use-case

    – Everything up2date and testet on a empty system
    – WPML, Elementor, HubSpot
    – adding a elementor shortcode widget
    – using the hubspot shortcode for forms ([hubspot type=”form” portal=”XXXXXXXX” id=”XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX”])

    When adding a shortcode with a hubspot form, the whole ATE duplicates the whole page and every string is duplicated in some kind of wpml_string_wrapper: content Element inside of ATE. The problem persists in the old and new ATE version. All these string are also added to the string table and spamming the system…

    • Hi Dannzen,

      Thank you for taking the time to leave a comment. Could you please open a support ticket with the details you listed? Our team will be able to look into the issue and try to replicate it.

    • Hi John,

      Thanks for your comment.
      The new version of the Advanced Translation Editor should definitely translate the title and slug of the post – your report is something our team needs to look into. Could you please open a ticket in our Support forum?

  8. Hello,

    URL query strings also get mutilated in the new ATE, too.
    Symptoms are:
    – the “&” characters get removed from the query string upon saving the URL
    – sometimes the query string gets displayed correctly in new ATE but is broken in the translated live website

    We contacted support about this and they confirmed it´s a bug:
    https://wpml.org/de/forums/topic/new-and-improved-ate-removes/

    As a workaround, support suggests to revert to the “old” ATE as described in the support reply.

    @WPML: At the top of this article, you write that the new and improved ATE is part of “WPML 4.7 – our upcoming big release”. Please please please develop and test this big release thoroughly before delivering it.

    Thank you!

    • Hi! Thanks a lot for bringing this to our attention and sharing the support ticket you created. I will double-check this with developers on our next call to make sure it’s being taken care of asap.

      About WPML 4.7, yes, that is what we are doing right now, testing it from all angles, including compatibility with themes, plugins, different types and sizes of sites, etc. I completely agree with you, testing is a crucial step of development and this is why we’re now using a big part of our whole team for testing and making sure all updates are working seamlesly when WPML 4.7 is released.