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How To Review Automatic Translations On Your Site

Dario
Updated
April 12, 2024

If you translate your whole site automatically, you have the option to review and edit the automatic translations before or after you publish them.

This article is written for site owners and Translation Managers. If you’re an external translator or reviewer, check out our documentation on how to work as a reviewer on WPML sites for relevant step-by-step instructions.

Automatic translation is a great way to generate quick translations, but it’s good practice to review them to make sure those translations are correct, readable, and sound natural to native speakers.

If you’re looking for professional reviewers, you can find great ones in our directory of translation reviewers.

On This Page:

Before You Start

Before you start working with a professional reviewer, there are a few things to check and know:

How To Enable Review Options

You have the following review options:

  • Review the translations before publishing
  • Publish translations and review them later
  • Publish translations without reviewing

You can choose a review option while going through the setup wizard, or by going to WPML → Settings and scrolling to the Automatic translation section.

Choosing a review option in the WPML setup wizard

Choosing a review option in WPML → Settings

Review the translations before publishing

This holds new automatic translations as a draft until you have reviewed and accepted each one.

Holding automatic translations for review before publishing only works with previously untranslated content. If you update a published, previously-translated page or post, the updated automatic translations will still be added to the queue for review, but they will be published immediately.

Publish translations and review them later

This publishes each translation immediately, but still adds them to the Translations Queue to review later.

Publish translations without reviewing

This option skips reviewing your translations and publishes them immediately on your site.

Reviewing Your Site’s Translations Yourself

When WPML is finished translating your content, a notification appears to tell you your translations are ready for a review. You can find this notification either in the top toolbar or in the Translation Management Dashboard.

Notifications that translations are ready for review

Click the notification to go to the translation queue and click the Review button. This allows you to preview your translation on the site’s front-end.

  • If the translation needs some work, click Edit Translation to open the Advanced Translation Editor and make changes.
  • If the translation looks good, click Publish this translation (if you opted to review before publishing) or Accept this translation (if you opted to review after publishing).
Reviewing a translated page

You can review all your pending translations in a row or only review one at a time. To change this setting, click the toggle switch.

If you click the Back button without accepting or publishing your translation, it will remain in the queue to be reviewed later.

Adding Other Reviewers To Your Site

You can also set up other users on your site to review translations. These can be others within your organization, or you can search our directory of translation reviewers to hire someone for your site.

To add a reviewer, go to WPML → Translation Management and click the Translators tab. Click Add a New Translator. Choose an existing user or create a new user and add the appropriate language pairs. Reviewers can have any WordPress role.

Adding translators to review your automatic translations

When you have translations available for review, your translators or reviewers can go to WPML → Translations to view the list of translation jobs. They can filter the list by translations that are Pending review and click the Review button to open each translation on the site’s front-end, accept and publish the translations, or edit them.

Translators can filter by translation status and choose what they want to review

Calculating Word Count

If you hire reviewers for your site, you may need to know the word count of the translations they review to pay them accordingly. As the website owner, you can see how many words are on each of your pages and posts.

Approving and Canceling Multiple Translation Reviews At Once

If you decide you don’t want to review each translation, you can approve or cancel translations in bulk. This also removes the jobs from your Translations Queue.

To do this, go to WPML → Translations, and select the translation jobs you want to change. Then choose Approve or Cancel from the dropdown menu to apply to all the selected jobs.

Approving or canceling translations in bulk

Approving your translation reviews publishes the translations immediately on the front-end of your site.

Canceling your translation reviews removes the jobs from your list without publishing them. Instead, it gives you the option of keeping your translations as a draft or deleting them. If you keep the translations as a draft, you can still publish them by using the language switcher in your site’s admin to change to a secondary language. Then, find and publish the secondary language drafts.

Deleting the drafted translations removes the secondary language drafts from your site. However, the translations are still saved in the translation memory if you choose to translate the page again later.

Because the content is already translated, deleting a drafted translation does not return the automatic translation credits used to your account.

Please note: if your site is set to review translations after publishing, you cannot cancel the translation review. This is because the translations have already been published.