I have successfully translated my clients website from English to German using WPML which is great!
Now we are going to add more languages to the website. When I added Spanish and selected translate everything, It started retranslating the German. We don't want the German to be retranslated from the English again because we have made some changes on the German pages. Is there anyway to exclude the already translated German content from being translated again?
Thank you for reaching out to WPML support. While you await assistance from one of my colleagues, I'll provide you with some initial debugging steps to help address the issue promptly.
If you're utilizing the automatic translation feature, please refrain from manually editing the translated German page. All translations are stored in the translation memory, as detailed here: https://wpml.org/documentation/translating-your-contents/how-wpml-keeps-track-of-your-translations/ . Retranslating the same content won't consume additional credits. Therefore, if you need to make changes, edit the primary language page and trigger the translation again.
I will explain the ideal setup and please can you let me know if this is possible.
My ideal setup would be:
1. Translate automatically to be on. This is because when I add a new language like Spanish WPML will automatically translate everything and create all the pages and templates in Spanish for me (I don't want to do this manually because it's quite a big website and has over 100 templates.)
2. Edit German / Spanish text where necessary. Some phrases sound good in English but not in other languages.
3. Once the German / Spanish page is edited, this version of the page remains unchanged if the English text changes.
It is point 3 in your description that is the problem.
When you make changes to an English original that marks the translations as requiring an update.
If you have automatically translate everything enabled, then the existing translations will automatically be updated, overwriting any manual edits you made to the prior translations.
In which case you need to disable translate everything automatically, and be more purposeful in selecting content for translation.
That doesn't mean you cannot translate content automatically, it's just that you have to send the content for automatic translation yourself, via WPML > Translation Management.
That way you are in control of what gets automatically translated, so that you can avoid re-translating existing translations which have edits you don't want to lose.
Appreciate the help guys. I think I've resolved the issue and I've got things working just the way I want them.
My current solution is WPML auto on. Translates everything. Then I make changes to the Elementor design template of the translated pages and that seems to create a permanent separation between that and the original English page so if the English is updated the translated page doesn't update.
After this I can make changes to the pages and there are no automatic changes after I update English.
I've completed this on 2 languages just 5 more to go !
Thanks for your help on this one guys - have a great weekend.
