Hi,
I am experiencing a recurring issue where my Gravity Forms string translations are being lost/overwritten automatically. This has happened three times now, forcing me to manually re-translate the same strings repeatedly.
The Issues:
Translation Loss: Strings that were previously translated into French (FR) are being overwritten by the default Dutch (NL) text after a period of time.
Wrong Language Registration: In the String Translation table, I am seeing strings from the secondary language (FR) being registered as the "original" string in the domain, which should not be happening.
Specific Scope: This behavior is exclusive to the gravity_form-7 domain (and other Gravity Forms domains).
Environment Details:
Default Language: Dutch (NL)
Secondary Language: French (FR)
Plugin: Gravity Forms multilingual via WPML String Translation.
Attachments:
I have attached screenshots showing the String Translation table where the domain gravity_form-7 shows mixed original languages and missing translations that were previously completed.
Thank you for your report. I’ll do my best to assist you. I can see that your plugins are being kept up to date - in this case, it would be very helpful if you could provide access to the environment (preferably a staging copy, not the production site). This would allow us to create a backup using Duplicator and try to identify the root cause of the issue. I will mark my next message as private.
It would also greatly help if you could answer a few questions:
* Have there been any recent changes to the language configuration?
* I can see that the "LiteSpeed Cache" plugin is active, which may introduce caching - has it been active for a long time, and was the site working correctly on WPML version 4.8? This information would be very useful.
* Is there a specific scenario or set of steps that leads to this issue? That would make it much easier to identify the cause.
I would greatly appreciate any additional information you can provide.
I can see that most of the plugins are up to date, so I tried to reproduce the reported issue on my local environment - unfortunately, I was not able to do so. However, I am fairly confident that the issue is related to caching. It looks like at some point cached data may have stored a translation without the correct source language, and later reused it instead of loading the current translated data.
I went ahead and installed the following plugins on your environment:
- Duplicator - unfortunately, I was not able to create a backup using it
- All-in-One WP Migration and Backup - I was able to create a copy that I can use for more detailed testing (full environment with all plugins)
- I did not remove any plugins, only deactivated them
Since there is no straightforward way to reproduce the issue:
1. Ideally, it would be helpful to temporarily disable any caching plugin (if possible) to verify whether the issue stops occurring.
2. I will use the backup to investigate further and try to identify the problematic area. Once I find a potential cause, I will ask you to apply a temporary workaround (a small code snippet) to confirm whether it resolves the issue. I will keep you updated on the progress.
I apologize for the delay, but this is a fairly complex case and at this point we still do not have a clear way to reliably reproduce the issue.
Apologies for the delay, but there were significant challenges with configuring the environment and reproducing the issue. I’m happy to confirm that I was finally able to reproduce it.
It appears that the root cause is the automatic registration of "value => label", where separate values are generated for each language (translated). This can become problematic if there is any logic in the application that relies on checking values in the original language rather than their translations, for example when comparing them to trigger specific actions.
The most effective solution I can suggest at this stage is:
- update all plugins to the latest versions (especially WPML-related ones)
- go to WPML > String Translation, scroll to the bottom of the page to the Utilities section, select Auto register untranslated strings, and set it to Disable auto register of untranslated strings - this ensures strings are stored correctly in the appropriate language
- in Forms > Forms, create a duplicate of the form "Order flowers/gift - Extensive form" and use this duplicated form (it will have the strings correctly saved within its domain)
Please let me know if this helps. I’ll be happy to assist further if anything remains a blocker.
