Background of the issue:
I just purchased and installed WPML on my website hidden link. I am trying to translate my website using the auto-translate feature.
Symptoms:
I receive a notification saying 'Out of Credits for Automatic Translation' and a modal notification stating 'You don't have enough credits to use auto translation', with options to 'get more credit' or 'never mind-don't auto translate'.
Questions:
Why am I receiving a notification about being out of credits for automatic translation when I just purchased and installed WPML?
To ensure the quickest and most accurate support, please provide your debug information so I can look at some of your configurations. We have an excellent article on how to locate it here: https://wpml.org/faq/provide-debug-information-faster-support/.
You have credits in your wpml.org account that need to be assigned to the site. To do so, follow these steps please:
- Log in to wpml.org → My Account → Manage Automatic Translation.
- Locate the domain tk2020.trak-kit.com (or add it) and click Assign Credits.
- Allocate the credits you need
- In WP-Admin go to WPML → Translation Management → Tools and refresh the page. You should have available credits now.
- Retry automatic translation; the warning should disappear.
Please try the following:
1. Temporarily remove your website from your WPML account at https://wpml.org/account/sites/. This action won't affect your translation credits or translation memory but will help refresh your license status.
2. Re-add your website and ensure to copy the newly generated key. When adding it, use the exact same format as shown in your WordPress admin under Settings > General (e.g., http or https, www or non-www).
3. Navigate to Plugins > Add New > Commercial in your WordPress dashboard.
4. If available, click on 'Unregister WPML' then 'Register WPML' and enter the new key.
5. Check if the credits are now available.
Thanks Otto. After 're-registering' our key, we still get "Out of Credits for Automatic Translation". Upon selecting the orange "Fix Now", we are presented modal options: "Get more credits" or ""Nevermind". Again, we just purchased the plugin a couple days ago. We attempted to translate our only 14 webpages. Why isn't our 'credits' not translating? Why do we need credits upon new plugin purchase?
Thanks for testing, and please apologize for the inconveniences.
This should be a smooth process. And unless there is some hidden content or the word count was wrong, the credits should be enough to translate 14 pages.
I'd like to take a better look at the issue. Is it possible for you to provide me with temporary access to your site?
The information you will enter is private, which means only you and I can see and have access to it.
Maybe I'll need to replicate your site locally. For this, I'll need to temporarily install a plugin called “Duplicator” or "All in One WP Migration" on your site.
This will allow me to create a copy of your site and your content.
Once the problem is resolved, I will delete the local site.
**IMPORTANT**
- Please make a backup of site files and database before providing us access.
- If you do not see the wp-admin/FTP fields, this means your post & website login details will be made PUBLIC. DO NOT post your website details unless you see the required wp-admin/FTP fields.
You don't have many pages, but you are translating into a few languages.
It looks like the credits were consumed, you can check how much each page costed in WPML -> Translation Management -> Translation tools -> Automatic translation usage reports
We don't understand. How can our credits be used up when we just started. We paid £99 ($134) for the plugin. That's the price of Microsoft' Windows operating system. Why is there still a payment to translate? Why!? Doesn't it start with 80,000 credits? We only have 12 core pages. This feels like a scam. Please explain.
First off, I’m really sorry this felt like an unpleasant surprise. I completely understand how frustrating it is to purchase a plugin and then immediately run into extra costs you didn’t expect. Let me clarify why that happens and what we’ve done to make sure you can keep translating without interruption.
Why are there extra charges for automatic translation?
* WPML license vs. translation credits
Your WPML license (the £99 you paid) gives you the plugin itself, its multilingual features, updates, and support. Automatic machine translation, however, relies on external engines (the same ones Microsoft, Google, and DeepL offer). Those providers charge WPML per word that’s sent to them, and WPML simply passes that cost on through a credit system.
* How credits are used
Each time you send a page to the Advanced Translation Editor, WPML has to translate *every string* on that page into *every target language*.
* Example: 1 000 words on a page × 3 target languages = 3 000 words translated.
* The starter bundle for a Multilingual CMS license is 90 000 words. If your 12 “core pages” average \~1 500 words each, and you’re translating them into three languages, that’s already \~54 000 words—over half the starter package—before you touch posts, menus, widgets, or SEO metadata.
* Manual vs. automatic translation
You can always translate yourself in the WP editor or Advanced Translation Editor without consuming credits. Credits are only needed when the machine does the initial pass.
---
What happened in your case
The page custom-options has 3120 words. And you use the PTC translation engine that charges 4 credits per word:
3120 x 8 x 4 = 99840
1. The starter credits were indeed consumed by the first round of page translations.
2. Most of the cost came from pages that were translated into several languages at once, which multiplies the word count.
There are less expensive (but offer lower quality translation engines available for you to use).
---
I added 70 000 extra credits
I am sorry for the misunderstanding, so I’ve topped up your account with an additional **70 000 credits** at no charge. You only need to assign them to your site:
1. Log in to WPML.org → My Account.
2. Find your domain *tk2020.trak-kit.com*
3. Click Assign credits, choose the 70 000 we just added, and save.
4. Back in WordPress go to **WPML → Translation Management → Tools** and click **Refresh credits**.
You should now see the new balance and be able to continue translating. But be aware the credits will be consumed and you may need to buy more to translate your content into eight languages.
---
How to keep costs predictable
* **Pay-as-you-go**: Consider enabling Pay-as-you-Go under **WPML → Translation Management → Tools → Payment & Settings**. It’s cheaper than prepaid bundles and includes 2 000 free words every month. You can also set a monthly spending cap so there are no surprises.
* **Translate selectively**: Translate only the pages that matter most first into a couple of languages, then expand gradually.
* **Reuse translations**: Once a sentence is translated once, it’s stored in Translation Memory so you never pay for it again, even across pages.
* **Review the usage report regularly**: **WPML → Translation Management → Tools → Automatic Translation Usage Report** shows exactly where credits go.
---
Not a scam—just machine-translation costs
I realize this may still feel counter-intuitive, especially when comparing the price to something like Windows. The key difference is that Windows doesn’t pay a third-party service every time you translate a sentence. WPML acts as a bridge to those services and bundles an initial quota, but ongoing usage incurs real-time costs from the translation providers themselves.
I hope this clears things up. Please go ahead and assign the new credits, and let me know if anything looks off or if you have more questions. I’m here to help.
How do I stop and delete the current translations? We want to choose Google translation engine instead of PTC for it's lower credit per word rate.
Thanks for crediting back 70k. Now that we better understand WPML, we feel it's best to completely reset the plugin-deleting everything including translations and databases.
With a cleaner slate, we can begin to meticulously choose the content, number of language in order to better manage the cost (credits).
How do we uninstall WPML include all associated files and database? And then reinstall it.
There is no need to reset and reinstall WPML. It's possible to do so, but I advise against it. I'll explain why and what I suggest instead.
Here’s the quickest way to switch to Google Translate, stop any remaining PTC jobs, and slim down to only the languages you really need, without wiping the whole setup:
---
## 1 · Switch the site to Google Translate
1. **WP-Admin → WPML → Settings → Automatic Translation**
2. Under **Which translation engines do you want to use?**, select **Google** and click **Save**. And unselect the others if you don't want to use them as an alternative if Google is not available for a language pair.
– You can still pick a different engine per job later, if you wish.
---
## 2 · Cancel any jobs still in the queue
1. **WPML → Translation Management → Translation jobs**
2. If a job shows *Waiting* or *In progress*, tick it and click **Cancel selected**.
– Finished pages keep their translations; only un-finished jobs are stopped.
– New requests will now go straight to Google.
3. Also go to WPML -> Support -> Troubleshooting -> Scroll down and click "Cancel in-progress automatic jobs"
---
## 3 · Re-translate only what you need
1. In **Pages** (or **Posts**), tick any page you’d like to redo.
2. Click **Translate automatically** again.
– WPML now uses Google.
– Sentences already in Translation Memory are filled in for free, so you only pay for truly new words.
---
### If you want to translate into fewer languages
1. **WPML → Languages → Site Languages**
2. You can remove languages: **Un-check** any language you no longer need and click **Save**.
* The language is hidden on the front-end and new translations won’t be created.
* Later, you can permanently delete its translations from the same screen if you’re sure you won’t need them again.
---
Why this is simpler than a full reset
* **Keeps what you like**: Any good PTC translations remain intact and editable.
* **Lower credit spend**: Translation Memory reuses content across engines at zero cost.
* **No duplicate media issues**: Extra care needs to be taken if the images were already duplicated to avoid issues with the Media Library.
* **Zero downtime**: You can switch engines and hide languages in minutes.
Let me know if this makes sense to you, or if you still rather remove WPML and re-install it.
We also noticed, that when we canceled the translation jobs, we're getting an error on two of the pages that was prior in progress.
The url of the pages displays page ids instead of the permalink url string.
The pages are
- Easy Trak
permalink : hidden link
- Easy Trak Order Form
permalink : hidden link
These are also tagged as 'draft' (see attached). But there's no way to publish them so they're not 'drafts'. Normall, in wordpress admin, the right column control changing the page from 'draft' to 'published'. But these button are not even there.
The topic ‘[Closed] Auto Translate – Credits Required’ is closed to new replies.
