<b>Background of the issue: </b>
I am trying to manage category translations on my WordPress site using WPML. The default language is English, and the new language is Japanese. I have set the categories default post taxonomy as NOT translatable in WPML settings, while the Posts post type is set as Translatable with fallback to the default language.
<b>Symptoms: </b>
All specific category archive pages are loading as Japanese, even though they don't have translations. They should redirect to the default canonical English fallback archives, but instead, we get duplicate content pages, which negatively impacts SEO.
All specific category archive pages are loading as Japanese (without translation)
domain.com/ja/resources/case-studies/
/ja/resources/events/
/ja/resources/press/
and the main categories archive /ja/resources/ as well
and their paginations /es/resources/case-studies/page/2/
All those categories don't have translations and they should redirect to the default canonical English fallback archives
domain.com/resources/case-studies/
Instead, we get a bunch of identical archive pages with duplicate content, which kills SEO.
<b>Questions: </b>
Why are untranslated category archive pages displaying in Japanese instead of redirecting to the English version?
How can I ensure that non-translatable categories redirect to the default language archives?
While you wait for my colleague to take over the ticket, let me try to help you with the issue quickly.
I am afraid that is expected since Not translatable settings mean, there is no language information, so these taxonomy/posts will appear in all languages. The best would be setting them to translatable and not translating them, then they will not appear in 2nd language, and if needed setup manual redirect rules for URLs in 2nd language.
Thank you. Your explanation makes sense.... But it's not at all obvious from the description of the setting. And this results in yet another workaround crutch.
And in general, the whole concept of how the plugin works assumes that everything will be translated, and endeavors to make versions of all layout sections in other languages. However, often the creators don't aim to translate all content, menus, taxonomies, fields and stuff like that. But the plugin has a very narrow scope for this approach.
Because of this, situations arise that I, to present just a few pages (and only their content, not all elements) in another language, have to spend a lot of time to find workarounds to use, for example, a single default main menu for all languages.
By the way, I asked a question about the menu not in the "found a bug" section, but in ‘I need help using WPML’ and therefore I can't track it anywhere now and don't know if I'll get an answer at all.
Or another situation. Automatic translation is only available in Advanced Translation Editor, but I can't use it to its full potential because it captures a bunch of unnecessary fields that I'm not going to translate and waste resources on. As a result, I have to click Save on each field just to confirm the copied content from the main language. Because without that, I can't save the entire translation of the page at the bottom and complete the translation. In addition, this Editor method doesn't work as a full Publish page for other plugins and custom functionality, and I still have to go into WP Editor and save the page there. Also, Advanced Translation Editor does not allow to manage custom fields and offers to translate them, although most of them are not intended for visible content at all.
So far I'm getting more trouble from the plugin to make it work for me than help.
Languages: English (English )Spanish (Español )Italian (Italiano )
Timezone: Europe/Rome (GMT+02:00)
What my colleague mentioned is not a workaround, is how the plugin works from the beginning.
The plugin "assumes" that the content can be translatable, which is different from must be translatable, and that's because while you can select what to translate, once you have a homepage in 2 languages, you are already working with a parallel site with a different language, so you already have different languages on your site, thus, content tends to be translatable already no matter if ALL the content will be visible on each language or not.
From there onwards the "not translatable" option might make sense only on a handful of scenarios and the ones you mention don't seem to fit them.
This is just a suggestion but it seems the most scalable option for your situation is to use "translatable - Only show translated Items" setting for the post type and taxonomies and then duplicate the content you don't wish to translate but still have available on other languages. That will work better than using the fallback option since you probably want the users to be able to "search" or filter the content that is shown in the original language and have control over what to show the users.
If there's content that you don't want to have available on a specific language, you don't translate it and that will do the trick 🙂
Would that work for you?
The topic ‘[Closed] NOT translatable Categories should NOT be displayed as translated’ is closed to new replies.
