Link a page to the page on Original language as a translation

This is the technical support forum for WPML - the multilingual WordPress plugin.

Everyone can read, but only WPML clients can post here. WPML team is replying on the forum 6 days per week, 22 hours per day.

Sun	Mon	Tue	Wed	Thu	Fri	Sat
-	7:00 – 12:00	7:00 – 12:00	7:00 – 12:00	7:00 – 12:00	7:00 – 12:00	-
-	13:00 – 15:00	13:00 – 15:00	13:00 – 15:00	13:00 – 15:00	13:00 – 15:00	-

Supporter timezone: Europe/Madrid (GMT+02:00)

Tagged: Documentation request

This topic contains 10 replies, has 0 voices.

Last updated by Atul Shinh 12 hours, 13 minutes ago.

Assisted by: Carlos Rojas.

Author	Posts
April 15, 2026 at 10:01 pm #17972333
Atul Shinh	We have a issue related to WPML translations on our website and need your support to resolve this. Following is the general structure that we are following for the translations on our website. The EN-US is the original or main source language/website. Most of the pages on different websites having same copy are linked as follows: - 1. EN-US -> all EN websites linked as duplicates 2. EN-US -> all non-EN websites linked as translations e.g. ES-ES, DE-DE and FR-FR 3. FR-FR -> all other French websites linked as duplicates e.g. FR-CA, FR-CH 4. DE-DE -> all other German websites linked as duplicates e.g. DE-AT, DE-CH The problem summary is below: - We have a page on the website e.g. “Awareness” which has some non-EN translations but not all. Initially many regional “Awareness” pages were not created as translation of the original language. Now we have realized this mistake and want to link the non-translated pages back to original translation. In order to do the above we tried following and found 2 scenarios for different websites. Screenshots are attached for both scenarios Scenario 1, for language websites e.g. German, which have dependent websites: - 1. Go to German regional page and edit it. 2. Under the page settings, go to Language section (screenshot attached). 3. There is no link “Connect with translations”, probably because this page further has 2 duplicates. Scenario 2, for language websites e.g. Spanish which have no dependent websites: - 1. Go to Spanish regional page and edit it. 2. Under the page settings, go to Language section (screenshot attached). 3. There is a link “Connect with translations” and click on it to link it back to US "Awareness" page. 4. When the "Awareness" page is searched, the page does not show up in the search results and hence we are not able to link this page to its correct source. In short, in both scenarios we are not able to link the regional pages to the main source page as translations. Please provide a resolution as how this problem can be solved or what could be the alternative way to solve this. Thanks
April 16, 2026 at 7:04 am #17972887
Lucas Vidal de Andrade WPML Supporter since 11/2023 Languages: English (English ) Spanish (Español ) German (Deutsch ) Portuguese (Brazil) (Português ) Timezone: Europe/Vienna (GMT+02:00)	Hello there, Thank you for sharing the details. While you are waiting for one of my colleagues to take this ticket and work on it, let me provide you with first debugging steps or if I can perhaps help with the issue quickly. To connect/disconnect a translation, it's necessary to use the WordPress Editor option. When a page uses the WPML Translation Editor, translations can only be added via this editor, not from other WordPress created pages. You can check more details here: https://wpml.org/faq/how-to-disconnect-translations-from-the-default-language-page-or-post/ Please make sure to have a full website backup before making any changes. If that does not help, one of my colleagues will soon come to continue support.
April 20, 2026 at 4:15 pm #17981759
Atul Shinh	Hi team, I tried the solution shared at the link shared https://wpml.org/faq/how-to-disconnect-translations-from-the-default-language-page-or-post/ I am aware of how to connect with translations but problem is the page that I want to connect with does not appear in the list which is strange issue and never had this. Please note that the page being searched is published, its Title and URL are Fraud Awareness, /legal/fraud-awareness (/legal is parent page slug). There was another page with same Title and URL but different parent. I have changed Title and URL of that page but still no use. All other pages which are siblings of this page do appear in the search list so there is some problem with this page. Please share any info on what could be reason for a page not appearing in the search bar for connecting the page. Attaching screenshots showing 1. Search pop-up not showing the correct page at all 2. The page's (page that does not appear in connection search popup) WPML translation status Thanks
April 21, 2026 at 11:50 am #17983963
Carlos Rojas WPML Supporter since 03/2017 Languages: English (English ) Spanish (Español ) Timezone: Europe/Madrid (GMT+02:00)	Hello, My name is Carlos, and I will continue working on this ticket If the page you want to link to does not appear in the selector, this means that the page in the original language has a translation/duplication in the secondary language, from where you are trying to link to it. The fastest way to solve this issue is to edit the page in the original language -> Duplicate it to the secondary language -> Delete the duplicated page (make sure it is not in the trash) -> Then try to link the pages again. By duplicating and then deleting the duplicated content, you make sure that the page in the original language is not connected to the secondary language and therefore can be linked from the secondary language. Please let me know if you need further assistance. We are here to help 🙂 Have an excellent day!
April 23, 2026 at 1:02 am #17988901
Atul Shinh	Hi Team, Thanks for the last response, following the same, I was able to solve the issue to linking the translation language page back to its source page. I tested for the Czech page and on website is displaying correct copy in Czech language. I need further help to solve the problem of WPML translation updates. Let us take one language e.g. Czech, after linking the Czech page back to source EN page when I go to edit translation for Czech language in WPML interface, the WPML UI presents empty translations. Is there any solution to above issue or the translations will have to be manually updated in WPML UI? One more question is, can we link a page in translation language to a page in another translation language as "duplicate" from the WordPress interface? Thanks
April 23, 2026 at 11:16 am #17990020
Carlos Rojas WPML Supporter since 03/2017 Languages: English (English ) Spanish (Español ) Timezone: Europe/Madrid (GMT+02:00)	Hi there, I'm glad to hear that you were able to solve the original issue. To answer your follow-up questions: 1.- This is the expected behavior, because the pages on the secondary languages were not created/translated via the Advanced Translation Editor (ATE). So in this case, there are two options: - Translate the page again via ATE - Disable ATE for this page as described in this guide: https://wpml.org/documentation/translating-your-contents/using-different-translation-editors-for-different-pages/ 2.- I don't understand your second (last) question. Can you elaborate a little more so I can have a better understanding?
April 28, 2026 at 5:24 pm #18000740
Atul Shinh	Hi Carlos and team, Thanks for support, re: #2 above please check explanation below:- We have language setup in WPML for most pages as follows: - 1. EN (source) > FR-FR (translation of EN) 2. FR-FR (translation of EN) > FR-BE (duplicate of FR-FR) Because we have FR-BE set as duplicate of FR-FR, sometimes during updates the duplicate link breaks between FR-FR and FR-BE. We can't find a way to link FR-BE back to FR-FR using WordPress or WPML UI. Would you be able to suggest a way to achieve this from admin interface? We found a way from the PHPMyAdmin interface. If there is no solution it is fine and I am ready to accept the closure of this request. Many thanks for great support.
April 28, 2026 at 6:20 pm #18000841
Carlos Rojas WPML Supporter since 03/2017 Languages: English (English ) Spanish (Español ) Timezone: Europe/Madrid (GMT+02:00)	Hi, Thank you very much for your message To be able to provide an answer, I would need to take a closer look at the issue and reproduce it. I kindly ask you to describe step-by-step how to reproduce the issue in a URL that we can use as a reference. You can attach screenshots, although the ideal way would be to share a link to a video showing the steps. This way, I can reproduce it exactly as you did with zero margin of error. Also, I would like to ask you to share the access credentials to the site in your next message, which I have set to private. This will allow me to reproduce the issue described above and double-check the WPML configuration. Please confirm you have created a full site backup that you can restore if necessary. Looking forward to your message.
April 28, 2026 at 9:57 pm #18001116
Atul Shinh	Hi Carlos, I think for now, as we have a solution I don't want to try it but if required in future will get back with a new ticket. I will mark this ticket resolved by next week. Hope that is OK. Thanks for the support.
April 29, 2026 at 8:35 am #18001921
Carlos Rojas WPML Supporter since 03/2017 Languages: English (English ) Spanish (Español ) Timezone: Europe/Madrid (GMT+02:00)	Sure, no problem! We will be here to help with WPML whenever you need us 🙂
May 4, 2026 at 3:00 pm #18011325
Atul Shinh	Hi team, I hope this is the last problem in this mystery. As per suggestion of Carlos on 21 Apr, I was able to link the language page to the source language page by creating a duplicate from source language and then delete it (trash as well) and then the page was visible in the list of "Connect to translations" link on translation language page. When I try to do that with other languages, duplicate is created but it is not linked to original page and hence I am not able to move forward. In the DB, table "wp_icl_translations" I can see that for IT language NULL value is assigned which is cause of issue but I was able to reset that for Czech using method suggested above. Kindly share how this can be solved. Thanks