I am working on an established website, europeansnowsport.com with many pages and translations.
We are nearing the end of a project to create a new theme for this website. Although about 70% of the texts are the same, the page layouts in the new site are completely different. We are also replacing the old Visual Composer with native WordPress block layouts. Manually cleaning up the old pages would be a nightmare; we have rebuilt the English (base language) pages from scratch and cut and pasted the existing texts in.
When it comes to the translated pages, I think that the most efficient way to apply the new layouts and content is to overwrite them with the English content using WPML and then use the Advanced Translation Editor (which we have used extensively in the past) so we can benefit from its translation memory and other tools.
I would prefer not to delete the pages completely, as we have added SEO keywords to some of the translated pages in the Yoast plugin.
Please can you advise how I can overwrite an existing page translation with the content from the original language. I can see an option to do that when there is no existing translation, but can WPML do the same thing and overwrite an existing translation?
Thank you for contacting WPML support, I'd be happy to help you with this issue.
To overwrite an existing translation page, you can follow steps below:
- Edit the page in the original language > Switch to WordPress editor.
- Then switch the language to a second language with the language switcher at the top bar.
- Click on the button "Overwrite with English content". Please check this screenshot hidden link
Or you can go to WPML > Translation Management to duplicate pages in bulk.
I have tried this as described and it really does not answer my question. It has overwritten my Yoast SEO metadata, which is what I said in my question I wanted to avoid. And what's worse, it has replaced the established, translated page URLs with the English ones.
When I clicked 'Overwrite with English content', the entire post was replaced with English content (as expected) but also including the Yoast SEO metadata.
But what is much more problematic is that when I then clicked the option to translate independently again, so I could add in the new German translations, I saw that the page slug (URL) had been overwritten with the English one. So mysite.com/de/kontakt became mysite.com/de/contact.
If I had not spotted this I would have lost the established page structure which is well established with the search engines, as well as any links from outside including our own advertising campaigns.
I think you added some SEO keywords in the Yoast plugin settings page, sorry if I misunderstood. If you want to copy content only and keep the current page settings, please try the following steps:
- Edit the page in the original language > Switch to WordPress editor.
- Then switch the language to a second language with the language switcher at the top bar.
- Delete content of the translation page > Save changes > Reload the page.
- You will see the button "Copy content from English" available, above the button "Overwrite with English content" > Click on the button to copy content from English.
Note: This will work with the WordPress editor, I see it does not work with other page builders like Elementor, Fusion, Divi ...
Let me know how it goes.
The topic ‘[Closed] Duplicate page content to overwrite an existing translation’ is closed to new replies.
