We’re excited to introduce “Translate Everything” – a top-requested feature that takes automatic translation to the next level. Translate Everything makes translating your content faster, easier, and cheaper than ever before, and makes keeping translations up to date a total breeze.
Since publishing this post, we released WPML 4.5.1 and 4.5.2. These include bug fixes and minor improvements, especially for Multilingual Blog license users. Be sure to update to the latest version for the best experience with WPML.
After nearly a year of development and months of testing, we’re excited to release WPML 4.5! This is WPML’s biggest release ever, and it comes jam-packed with loads of new features. Here are some of the highlights:
Translate Everything Automatically & Review Before Publishing
WPML 4.5 expands the automatic translation feature, allowing you to translate all your posts, pages, custom post types, products, taxonomy, custom fields, and more, simply by enabling the new Translate Everything mode.
See how it works in this short video:
Translate Everything mode immediately translates your content in the background as you publish it or edit existing content. This saves you tons of time and money, and ensures your site’s translations always stay up to date.
Translate all your content automatically as you create or edit it
You can also hold your translations for review before or after publishing and check how each translation looks on the front-end of your site.
Reviewing translations on your site’s front-end before publishing
Hire External Translation Reviewers
What if you don’t speak the language you’re translating your site into? No problem! Also new to WPML is the Translation Reviewer Directory. This helps you find qualified external reviewers with WPML experience that speak your site’s languages. These reviewers will double-check that everything sounds natural and correct. Plus, since the reviewers aren’t translating your content from scratch, their rates are reasonable enough to fit any budget.
New Payment Options for Automatic Translation
Automatic translation remains the most affordable and quickest way to translate your site, and now you have two payment options for your added convenience.
Pay As You Go
You can still sign up for an automatic translation account and pay for the number of credits you actually use each month, just as before. If you don’t use automatic translation, you don’t have to pay anything. Plus, you get 2,000 credits each month just for having an automatic translation account.
Clients who purchase a new Multilingual CMS or Agency account starting from September 29th a package of automatic translation credits included for free with their purchase.
More Site Keys
Don’t worry about “wasting” your site keys on development sites. All WPML accounts (both new clients and existing clients) get extra site keys specifically for development sites.
Account type
# of production keys
# of development keys
Blog
1
3
CMS
3
9
Agency
Unlimited
Unlimited
Fewer Plugins to Manage
The Translation Management add-on is now included in WPML’s core plugin for Multilingual CMS and Agency accounts. This means one less plugin to install and keep up to date while maintaining all the same functionality you had before.
The Translation Management tabs are also more intuitive to make navigating the WPML plugin easier.
Don’t use Translation Management? No worries. WPML only loads the code that handles the features you use, so it won’t slow your site. For example, if you don’t use a translation service or automatic translation, it won’t load the code that handles translation services or automatic translation.
New Setup Wizard
We’ve completely revamped the WPML setup wizard so that making your site multilingual is straightforward and simple. Plus, now that the Translation Management add-on is part of the WPML core plugin, all the setup is part of one streamlined process.
Choosing Your Site’s Languages
Choosing How to Translate
If you create a custom or country-specific language, you can now map it to a pre-configured language as you create it in the setup wizard or in WPML → Languages. This allows you to use automatic translation and spell check with your custom languages. Now, you only need to make minor edits instead of translating from scratch.
Bug Fixes, Compatibility Updates, and More
For a full list of everything included in this release, check out the changelog.
We’re Already Running WPML 4.5 on a Production Site
Our site Adelance has been using WPML 4.5 for the last two months. This allowed us to “field test” the WPML 4.5 features and work out any issues before releasing it to clients. It also gave us first-hand experience as our own client, and we’re confident and excited about the results.
Translating and reviewing this site takes about 10% of the time it previously took us to translate ourselves from scratch. The results in both Spanish and Hebrew are at least as good as before. Automatic translation really excels with straightforward texts written in conversational language.
Plus, it keeps our translation costs much lower than before. This means we can translate the entire site without worrying about breaking the budget.
How to Install WPML 4.5
As with other major releases, we are deploying WPML 4.5 gradually. You will see the update on your site as it becomes available.
To skip the queue and get this update right away go to Plugins → Add New, click the Commercial tab, and then use the Check for updates button.
Checking for the WPML 4.5 update
Of course, you can also download WPML 4.5 manually by going to your WPML account’s Downloads page.
Give WPML 4.5 a Try and Let Us Know How We Did
Now, we’d like to hear from you!
What kind of site do you have, and how do you think WPML 4.5 will help you?
Before trying WPML 4.5, do you feel like you know what to expect and what the new features are?
After trying WPML 4.5, what do you like most and least about release?
Are there any issues this release doesn’t address that you’d like us to prioritize next? Please include links to relevant support tickets.
We rely on your feedback to help shape our releases, so please be sure to share your feedback in the comments below!
How can we make WPML better for you?
Share your thoughts and comments about our plugin, documentation, or videos by booking a Zoom call with Agnes, our Client Advocate. Your feedback matters and helps us improve.
100 Responses to “WPML 4.5 – Translate All of Your Site’s Content Automatically”
Hi Allison, We are a small digital communication company with more than 40 websites using WPML and others using other translation tools. Whether we are using WPML or other multilingual solution we never:
– translate anything automatically;
– send any material to be translated to an external translator that will translate directly in WPML;
Just because of that all the emphasis that is putted on the translation management aspect of WPML is causing us to reconsider using WPML. We feel that WPML is getting too complex, too confusing. Advanced Translation Editor, to us, is another step in the wrong direction. At least we can deactivate it for now. At a minimum we think that we will need to invest internally to develop a flow and generic settings for WPML. And since we feel that you are changing these often we are wondering if this is worth it.
Also consider that with WPML, the translation process (flow) is not always the same depending on the tool (plugin) we use and it is confusing. As an example for Gravity Forms, we are forced to issue a translation job, not for the pages or articles.
Not related but also important to us, we rely heavily on page builder tools such as Beaver Builder and many times we find WPML exceptions that won’t work with these tools and break the development flow – and wouldn’t work with any sort of automatic translation. We work closely with the developers of the tools but often that is not enough – they won’t make the necessary changes or the corrective process takes too long to be included in the projects timelines. We feel that you should invest in your partners support to better and accelerate the corrections.
To us translation management should be completely optional and we should be able to dismiss it completely without any penalty, the same with advance translation editor. Again, too much emphasis is putted on all this translation process.
Sincerely
Hi Claude – We really appreciate your detailed feedback. Sharing with our team now!
This version it certainly saves a lot of time and a lot hassle too. But there are some theme issues with Sydney Pro for example, many translations have been lost after the upgrade, and I am pretty sur itMS the theme issue not wpml.
Thx
Hi Hocine – I’m sorry to hear that you’re having trouble with Sydney Pro. Have you contacted our support team about this yet? They would be happy to look into this for you.
Hi Allison,
I support Claude’s comments in that I use the classic translation manager for translations, and do not want to be forced into using the ATE or run auto translations.
On another point, though, I use BackupBuddy for my backups and migrations, but there’s been a known issue with WPML for some time. In order to migrate a site running WPML I have to deactivate WPML, do the backup, restore the site in its new location and then reactivate WPML.
If I don’t do that I get a fatal error.
Has that problem been addressed in 4.5?
Thanks,
Martin.
Hi Martin – Thanks for your comment. Please note, you don’t have to enable the Advanced Translation Editor or automatically translate any of your pages. You can enable the Classic Translation Editor anytime by going to WPML → Settings.
The issue with BackupBuddy was solved with WPML 4.4. If you are still experiencing the issue, I would recommend reaching out to our support team who can help investigate this with you.
Hi Allison,
OK, thanks!
I’ll get in touch with support.
Cheers.
Hello,
For me, too, the new WPML release has caused me to reconsider WPML. I just used WPML for a multilingual website relaunch, and encountered the following obstacles:
– We do not want to use the Advanced Translation Manager, so I turned it off in the WPML settings. However, this didn’t do anything, so the next time someone clicked on editing a translation, it opened the Advanced Translation Manager. Canceling the translation resulted in all of the translation’s contents being erased, it had to be brought back by backup.
– Flushing WPML cache deletes previously translated fields, e.g. string translations and some settings.
– Editors can’t translate anything unless being assigned the Translator role. I do not understand the use case for this, by default only Admins can translate, but for us, the admin never touches content. It is tedious to assign editors translation privileges every time a new editor account is created.
– WPML uses up a lot of RAM. I don’t know why exactly, but it just makes our site very slow. For us, WPML adds a lot of additional functionality we do not use, e.g. the translation management system. For a multilingual site that doesn’t work with external translators, this adds a lot of bloat.
– WPML does not have an API, so migrating a multilingual site to WordPress is cumbersome.
– We had to add another plugin to transliterate Cyrillic slugs. In my opinion, this is something a lot of multilingual websites need, and I wish WPML spent more time developing functionality like this instead of on translation management.
– The string translation tool is very difficult to use. E.g. when you search for a string, but the search turns up hundreds of results and you want to narrow it down by selecting a text domain from the dropdown, your search is reset and it shows all strings from that text domain, instead of only the strings from that text domain that are relevant for the search term.
All things considered, we’ll be looking at other options for future projects.
Best,
Tina
Thank you for taking the time to provide your feedback, Tina. We really appreciate your insights. Have you contacted our support team about any of these issues (especially the first issue with the Advanced Translation Editor continuing to open after selecting the Classic Translation Editor)? They can help with troubleshooting why that’s happening, and a support ticket helps us track the issue better as well. I’ll be sure to share your comments internally.
It was very hard to discover how I could translate automaticaly. When I registered (with creditcard) for this option I could not see in my account that it was active, just a button so that I have to buy credits. I was not able to activate it on any of my websites.
After sometime I discovered how to translate automatically. The translation was working good!, but all of the links from my translated pages are now set to the default language, in stead of keeping them to the original link addresses.
That is really a problem, cause now I have to check every link in every page and correct it manual to the proper page. This is really a big problem!! You have to do something about it, ot else I can do better a translation by myself.
Regards, Han
SO BAD this auto translate !!
Now when I am trying to translate some pages it looks good, but when you publish these pages, ALL of the original links are set to the default language. So now I have to check every page on every link and correct it.
This is really bad and shit. Now I have to do much more work than when I would have translated the pages by myself.
How can you publish such a shit version??
I will not recommend anyone to activate this feature, watch out for much of work instead of less.
Very disappointed I am.
Han
Hi Han,
I am sorry to hear that this is what happened! Links should get pointed to the right translated content, if this does not happen it can be an indication of a few things – one may be the wpml-config XML not properly set by a plugin or theme author, another that the links are included outside the content or some other, not conventional way.
In order for me to help you resolve this, I will need some more details.
I am sending you an email now so I can get those details from you.
Hi, well I have to say that I agree with lots of the above comments.
One made by Tina is quite explicit of the wrong way WPML is going on :
“WPML adds a lot of additional functionality we do not use, e.g. the translation management system. For a multilingual site that doesn’t work with external translators, this adds a lot of bloat.”
And indeed, the string translation filters are working so badly. Please don’t launch the search at the moment we select any filter, instead add a search button to let us chose all filters we want to be applied, and then only searching for results, which can already be quite slow to load (!).
These are mostly simple options to change, but could help us a lot to enjoy this still cumbersome product.
At least I’m happy to see the automatic translation coming to life, but please address the excessive complexity where possible from now. It’s a well known topic by the community from years now.
I faced a problem a long time back with auto translation. With one click for a month or two, my traffic increased 5x but soon the problem started with duplicate content.
Hi there – thank you for your comment. Do you have any support tickets you can share so we can better understand the problem?
Hi all,
I’d like to add my agreement with a lot of the posts above. Like Claude, we are a small agency managing quite a number of multi-lingual websites for clients and we use WPML extensively. I also agree with Tina, some excellent points there.
We manage a simple workflow where we use WPML to duplicate existing pages into new languages but then we source the translations from trusted translators and add them manually using the classic editor. We have tried importing translations automatically before and had issues which meant we had to redo a lot of the work. At least with manual addition of content, we have no surprises.
WPML’s increasing complexity makes it ever harder to implement and configure correctly – one of our devs recommended we try one of your competitors as the implementation was so much simpler – unfortunately, they insist on charging for automatic machine translation which we have no interest in, so we had to stick with WPML for now.
I respect your right to add automatic translation and similar services, there is obviously a need for it, but please don’t forget those of us who work with WPML in a much simpler fashion.
Thanks,
David
Hi David – Thank you for your comment. We haven’t changed any of the existing workflows – only added the Translate Everything feature for those who want to use it. You can continue to duplicate pages and posts and add translations manually, and the process is the same now as it was before. Is there a particular part of the setup process that you or your developers find especially difficult to navigate?
Hi Allison,
Thanks for the reply, I’m aware the workflow hasn’t changed, I was kind of expressing my hope that it won’t change in future despite the additions of automatic translations, etc.
Where we find increasing complexity from a dev perspective is the integration with Advanced Custom Fields, which we use extensively. The Custom Fields section of the Multilingual Content Setup box in the admin area of a typical page using ACF can easily run to 200 or more items, which renders it basically unmanageable.
Regards,
David
Thanks for the clarification, David, and for the details about your use case with ACF. I’ll pass your feedback along!
Deactivate and delete from wordpress is not enough? Must login through sftp and delete the folder?
“Since WPML 4.5.0, the Translation Management plugin is part of WPML core. Please uninstall this plugin and delete it from your plugins folder. Read more “
Hi Dimitris – You can just deactivate and delete the plugin from your site.
Agreeing to many of the points mentioned above. Apart from those, we consider it to be an unfair step towards LSPs that you were partnering up and signing agreements with. If WPML users are promoted to use automatic translation why did you build a network of translation agencies to support the purchase or usage of your tool? Not to forget about the commission fees we are charged with on top, when WPML clients are using our translation services.
Automatic translation is still only one option we provide to clients for translating their sites. We also continue to offer the ability to translate sites yourself, add other users to your site to act as translators, or hire a professional translation service. Each of these options is going to be the right fit for different types of sites, budgets, users, etc.
It’s also important to note that we don’t charge LSPs a commission for clients they refer to WPML. Please be sure to use your tsid parameter on any referral links so we know which clients were referred to us by you.
Hi Allison, We are a small digital communication company with more than 40 websites using WPML and others using other translation tools. Whether we are using WPML or other multilingual solution we never:
– translate anything automatically;
– send any material to be translated to an external translator that will translate directly in WPML;
Just because of that all the emphasis that is putted on the translation management aspect of WPML is causing us to reconsider using WPML. We feel that WPML is getting too complex, too confusing. Advanced Translation Editor, to us, is another step in the wrong direction. At least we can deactivate it for now. At a minimum we think that we will need to invest internally to develop a flow and generic settings for WPML. And since we feel that you are changing these often we are wondering if this is worth it.
Also consider that with WPML, the translation process (flow) is not always the same depending on the tool (plugin) we use and it is confusing. As an example for Gravity Forms, we are forced to issue a translation job, not for the pages or articles.
Not related but also important to us, we rely heavily on page builder tools such as Beaver Builder and many times we find WPML exceptions that won’t work with these tools and break the development flow – and wouldn’t work with any sort of automatic translation. We work closely with the developers of the tools but often that is not enough – they won’t make the necessary changes or the corrective process takes too long to be included in the projects timelines. We feel that you should invest in your partners support to better and accelerate the corrections.
To us translation management should be completely optional and we should be able to dismiss it completely without any penalty, the same with advance translation editor. Again, too much emphasis is putted on all this translation process.
Sincerely
Hi Claude – We really appreciate your detailed feedback. Sharing with our team now!
This version it certainly saves a lot of time and a lot hassle too. But there are some theme issues with Sydney Pro for example, many translations have been lost after the upgrade, and I am pretty sur itMS the theme issue not wpml.
Thx
Hi Hocine – I’m sorry to hear that you’re having trouble with Sydney Pro. Have you contacted our support team about this yet? They would be happy to look into this for you.
Hi Allison,
I support Claude’s comments in that I use the classic translation manager for translations, and do not want to be forced into using the ATE or run auto translations.
On another point, though, I use BackupBuddy for my backups and migrations, but there’s been a known issue with WPML for some time. In order to migrate a site running WPML I have to deactivate WPML, do the backup, restore the site in its new location and then reactivate WPML.
If I don’t do that I get a fatal error.
Has that problem been addressed in 4.5?
Thanks,
Martin.
Hi Martin – Thanks for your comment. Please note, you don’t have to enable the Advanced Translation Editor or automatically translate any of your pages. You can enable the Classic Translation Editor anytime by going to WPML → Settings.
The issue with BackupBuddy was solved with WPML 4.4. If you are still experiencing the issue, I would recommend reaching out to our support team who can help investigate this with you.
Hi Allison,
OK, thanks!
I’ll get in touch with support.
Cheers.
Hello,
For me, too, the new WPML release has caused me to reconsider WPML. I just used WPML for a multilingual website relaunch, and encountered the following obstacles:
– We do not want to use the Advanced Translation Manager, so I turned it off in the WPML settings. However, this didn’t do anything, so the next time someone clicked on editing a translation, it opened the Advanced Translation Manager. Canceling the translation resulted in all of the translation’s contents being erased, it had to be brought back by backup.
– Flushing WPML cache deletes previously translated fields, e.g. string translations and some settings.
– Editors can’t translate anything unless being assigned the Translator role. I do not understand the use case for this, by default only Admins can translate, but for us, the admin never touches content. It is tedious to assign editors translation privileges every time a new editor account is created.
– WPML uses up a lot of RAM. I don’t know why exactly, but it just makes our site very slow. For us, WPML adds a lot of additional functionality we do not use, e.g. the translation management system. For a multilingual site that doesn’t work with external translators, this adds a lot of bloat.
– WPML does not have an API, so migrating a multilingual site to WordPress is cumbersome.
– We had to add another plugin to transliterate Cyrillic slugs. In my opinion, this is something a lot of multilingual websites need, and I wish WPML spent more time developing functionality like this instead of on translation management.
– The string translation tool is very difficult to use. E.g. when you search for a string, but the search turns up hundreds of results and you want to narrow it down by selecting a text domain from the dropdown, your search is reset and it shows all strings from that text domain, instead of only the strings from that text domain that are relevant for the search term.
All things considered, we’ll be looking at other options for future projects.
Best,
Tina
Thank you for taking the time to provide your feedback, Tina. We really appreciate your insights. Have you contacted our support team about any of these issues (especially the first issue with the Advanced Translation Editor continuing to open after selecting the Classic Translation Editor)? They can help with troubleshooting why that’s happening, and a support ticket helps us track the issue better as well. I’ll be sure to share your comments internally.
It was very hard to discover how I could translate automaticaly. When I registered (with creditcard) for this option I could not see in my account that it was active, just a button so that I have to buy credits. I was not able to activate it on any of my websites.
After sometime I discovered how to translate automatically. The translation was working good!, but all of the links from my translated pages are now set to the default language, in stead of keeping them to the original link addresses.
That is really a problem, cause now I have to check every link in every page and correct it manual to the proper page. This is really a big problem!! You have to do something about it, ot else I can do better a translation by myself.
Regards, Han
SO BAD this auto translate !!
Now when I am trying to translate some pages it looks good, but when you publish these pages, ALL of the original links are set to the default language. So now I have to check every page on every link and correct it.
This is really bad and shit. Now I have to do much more work than when I would have translated the pages by myself.
How can you publish such a shit version??
I will not recommend anyone to activate this feature, watch out for much of work instead of less.
Very disappointed I am.
Han
Hi Han,
I am sorry to hear that this is what happened! Links should get pointed to the right translated content, if this does not happen it can be an indication of a few things – one may be the wpml-config XML not properly set by a plugin or theme author, another that the links are included outside the content or some other, not conventional way.
In order for me to help you resolve this, I will need some more details.
I am sending you an email now so I can get those details from you.
Hi, well I have to say that I agree with lots of the above comments.
One made by Tina is quite explicit of the wrong way WPML is going on :
“WPML adds a lot of additional functionality we do not use, e.g. the translation management system. For a multilingual site that doesn’t work with external translators, this adds a lot of bloat.”
And indeed, the string translation filters are working so badly. Please don’t launch the search at the moment we select any filter, instead add a search button to let us chose all filters we want to be applied, and then only searching for results, which can already be quite slow to load (!).
These are mostly simple options to change, but could help us a lot to enjoy this still cumbersome product.
At least I’m happy to see the automatic translation coming to life, but please address the excessive complexity where possible from now. It’s a well known topic by the community from years now.
I faced a problem a long time back with auto translation. With one click for a month or two, my traffic increased 5x but soon the problem started with duplicate content.
Hi there – thank you for your comment. Do you have any support tickets you can share so we can better understand the problem?
Hi all,
I’d like to add my agreement with a lot of the posts above. Like Claude, we are a small agency managing quite a number of multi-lingual websites for clients and we use WPML extensively. I also agree with Tina, some excellent points there.
We manage a simple workflow where we use WPML to duplicate existing pages into new languages but then we source the translations from trusted translators and add them manually using the classic editor. We have tried importing translations automatically before and had issues which meant we had to redo a lot of the work. At least with manual addition of content, we have no surprises.
WPML’s increasing complexity makes it ever harder to implement and configure correctly – one of our devs recommended we try one of your competitors as the implementation was so much simpler – unfortunately, they insist on charging for automatic machine translation which we have no interest in, so we had to stick with WPML for now.
I respect your right to add automatic translation and similar services, there is obviously a need for it, but please don’t forget those of us who work with WPML in a much simpler fashion.
Thanks,
David
Hi David – Thank you for your comment. We haven’t changed any of the existing workflows – only added the Translate Everything feature for those who want to use it. You can continue to duplicate pages and posts and add translations manually, and the process is the same now as it was before. Is there a particular part of the setup process that you or your developers find especially difficult to navigate?
Hi Allison,
Thanks for the reply, I’m aware the workflow hasn’t changed, I was kind of expressing my hope that it won’t change in future despite the additions of automatic translations, etc.
Where we find increasing complexity from a dev perspective is the integration with Advanced Custom Fields, which we use extensively. The Custom Fields section of the Multilingual Content Setup box in the admin area of a typical page using ACF can easily run to 200 or more items, which renders it basically unmanageable.
Regards,
David
Thanks for the clarification, David, and for the details about your use case with ACF. I’ll pass your feedback along!
Deactivate and delete from wordpress is not enough? Must login through sftp and delete the folder?
“Since WPML 4.5.0, the Translation Management plugin is part of WPML core. Please uninstall this plugin and delete it from your plugins folder. Read more “
Hi Dimitris – You can just deactivate and delete the plugin from your site.
Agreeing to many of the points mentioned above. Apart from those, we consider it to be an unfair step towards LSPs that you were partnering up and signing agreements with. If WPML users are promoted to use automatic translation why did you build a network of translation agencies to support the purchase or usage of your tool? Not to forget about the commission fees we are charged with on top, when WPML clients are using our translation services.
Disappointing!
Hi there – You might be interested in this post about What WPML 4.5 Brings If You’re Using A Translation Service.
Automatic translation is still only one option we provide to clients for translating their sites. We also continue to offer the ability to translate sites yourself, add other users to your site to act as translators, or hire a professional translation service. Each of these options is going to be the right fit for different types of sites, budgets, users, etc.
It’s also important to note that we don’t charge LSPs a commission for clients they refer to WPML. Please be sure to use your tsid parameter on any referral links so we know which clients were referred to us by you.