We noticed that the translation edits from June 3 appear to have been deleted.
We would like to understand how this could have happened, as logically speaking, we would never intentionally delete any translations — especially considering that the current Chinese content is still present on the website.
So how could it be classified as a deletion of translations?
We genuinely want to know how to avoid such issues in the future, because losing translation content causes significant disruptions to our workflow and operations.
It's hard to tell. Most “vanished-but-still-visible” cases stem from either (a) mixing editors or (b) restoring the database without resynchronizing the Advanced Translation Editor (ATE).
Why the edits could appear as “deleted”?
• Switching editors after the translation was made – if the page was first translated with the Classic/WordPress editor and later opened in ATE, the translated strings no longer appear inside ATE even though they remain on the front-end, giving the impression they were deleted.  
• Site restore or migration – a database rollback performed after 3 June can break the link between local translation jobs and ATE’s cloud memory, so the job shows “empty” while the live Chinese content persists. 
• Updating the source page after translating – changing layout or content in the default language can re-segment strings; any segment that no longer matches is treated as new/blank in ATE. 
How to prevent this in future?
• Commit to one editor per post type – keep ATE enabled for the full life-cycle of a page, or disable it and stay with the WordPress editor; do not switch back and forth. 
• Run “Synchronize local jobs with ATE” after any backup restore or migration (WPML ▸ Support ▸ Advanced). This re-attaches lost jobs so their history stays intact. 
• Use WordPress Revisions as an extra safety net – you can always roll a translation back to 3 June from the Revisions panel before any changes are overwritten. 
• Schedule incremental backups before translation sprints so you can restore both database and WPML tables together and avoid desynchronization. (Best-practice recommendation, general.)
With these safeguards in place, the risk of losing translation work is effectively eliminated.
This morning I found that the WPML Chinese translation of another old article was lost!!!
Please help WPML find the problem and provide a way to restore the translation of the old article instead of re-translating the whole article... hidden link
The SEO team in the link adjusted the article structure of the English version, and other language versions need to be re-translated.
When the Chinese part enters the WPML backend for translation, the original unchanged content will be retained, and only the changed text needs to be re-translated.
However, as shown in the figure, only 23% of the translated content was retained.
The key is that the adjustments made by the SEO team are not major modifications, but only a small part of the content.
This is the third time it has happened
If this situation continues to happen
It's really troublesome
Please help deal with it, thank you
1. Currently, all the articles reporting the disappearance of Chinese are only using the WPML editor, and there is no problem of using mixing editors as mentioned in a. Therefore, the possibility of the disappearance of Chinese is that WPML is speculated to restore the data base on 6/3 as mentioned by b. I have asked the engineer to confirm whether this is the case.
2. If it is really the case of b, since we all have backups, can we ask WPML how we can revert the translation of the WPML database? Instead of spending time translating again...
3. Finally, WPML mentioned "Schedule incremental backups before translation sprints so you can restore both database and WPML tables together and avoid desynchronization. (Best-practice recommendation, general.)" How can this be done? What is the purpose of doing this? We don't quite understand what it means...
1.The engineer just responded that we did not restore the data base on 6/3.
In addition, I checked the previous messages. I reported the problem of missing Chinese on June 2, which means that the problem occurred before June 3!
First of all, we did not mix editor translations, nor did we restore the database as WPML speculated.
Anyway, my focus is to solve the problem
Just figure out how to put the previously translated materials back.
The original content of the page was edited, right? Did those changes affect the layout/structure of the post?
All the other languages are OK, no? How were those languages translated? How the translations were updated after editing the original content? What's the difference between them and Chinese?
The original content is written in Engish.
Only Chinese is translated manually, the rest of 6 languages are using WPML auto translation.
In the video you can see, after changing EN content for 1 sentance, all 7 languages became circle.
FR and GE- I used auto translation and they were working fine.
But when I enter to Chinese, most of my translations are gone!
Since I didnt completed Chinese, we can see the Post in Chinese is ok.
My problem is I have to redo the Chinese translation again not the only 1 changed sentance.
Chinese is using WPML editor and translate the content manually.
Normally, when I enter to WPML Chinese, the Chinese should be look like FR or GE...
It normally show up the revised sentence for tranlatation.
There were originally three issues I reported to you.
However, I have now discovered that whenever I update the English content, and then access the Chinese version via WPML, most of the previously translated Chinese content disappears...
This indicates that the issue is system-wide, not limited to a single post or page.
And all of this started happening after WPML recommended enabling the "Map" feature on May 29.
“The Footer template has not yet been translated in WPML > Translation Management.”
It is recommended that users map custom languages (such as Chinese) to WPML-recognized languages (such as zh) in order for the automatic translation feature to work properly.
Languages: English (English )Spanish (Español )Italian (Italiano )
Timezone: Europe/Rome (GMT+01:00)
Hello there, I think I know what the problem here was, but before I can confirm this I need to know: When did you change the default locale of the chinese language?
Because we have contrasting information. your site has been on numerous staging sites and you have translated content on those staging sites as well. not many but some.
However on those staging sites like stg-uprtekcom-stage.kinsta.cloud, I could find references of the chinese language code to be "zh", on other jobs and on the current site you have it as "zh-TW"
Now a few things to bear in mind here:
1) The default locale is wrong as "zh-TW". it should be at most "zh_TW" (with an undersore).
2) If your previous translation existed when you had "zh" as the language code, then that is seen as a different language, thus, possible different translation, thus "Missing translation".
The language code exists mainly to help crawlers and other systems to understand your language and when it comes to search engines, using "zh" will include all of their kinds, including "tw".
This could be the reason why, because you actually do have a lot of translation memory and on the page you once used as a refence, you actually did have content translated from before, but it wasn't all of it.
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It's normal that when you make even a typo fix on the original language of a page, the rest will appear as "needs update", that's expected and that won't translate anything, it will just let you know there's something to be done.
Please let me know So I can understand what we can do to find a solution for this problem.
Languages: English (English )Spanish (Español )Italian (Italiano )
Timezone: Europe/Rome (GMT+01:00)
No no, here's the thing:
Whenever you set a deafault locale, it will be seen as a new language, so if you had content with the locale "zh" then the translation memory will be there for that locale, then if you switched it to "zh-TW" and checked the same pages, the translation memory would be 0 and that page would look empty because well, it's as if you had added a different language!
If you change it again you'll end up having everything deleted as well.
We can ask our devs to merge them all together, of course, but we need to know how many locales you used. can you in the meantime confirm you had "zh" and then switched to "zh-TW"?
That way I can talk to our devs and we can then fix the locale to zh_TW and move everything to that locale, ok?
Our engineer changed zh-TW back to zh_TW in the staging environment. However, as shown in the video, I’m unable to access the WPML Chinese section, so I can’t confirm whether the Chinese translations are still there.
Languages: English (English )Spanish (Español )Italian (Italiano )
Timezone: Europe/Rome (GMT+01:00)
Ok, let's do this. do you have new pages to translate? or only old pages to translate? that way I can already ask our devs to help here and move everything to zh_TW and that way you'll probably recover everything.
However this might take some time since they need to track where all the content is.
By the way, please use WPML > Translation Management for now, you can't edit a page that was using first a locale and then edit the same translation with another locale because, again, it's as if you wanted to edit different languages at once with just 1 button.
With Translation Management you'll be always creating a new "translation session" so it will open the editor without issues. However, with that change I can assure you that if you do have translations there is just because that locale had been previously used.
Please allow us to fix this on our end before you translate content that was previously translated with a different locale.
