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This thread is resolved. Here is a description of the problem and solution.

Problem:
You have a bilingual site in English and Arabic, with English as the default language. While creating posts in Arabic, you want the taxonomies to display in English in the backend, but they currently appear in Arabic.
Solution:
We currently do not support changing the backend language for taxonomy terms while maintaining different front-end translations directly through WPML settings. However, you can achieve this by implementing a custom filter in your theme's functions.php file. Here is a sample code you might consider:

add_filter('get_terms', function($terms, $taxonomies, $args, $term_query) {<br />    if (is_admin() && in_array('person_type', $taxonomies)) {<br />        foreach ($terms as $term) {<br />            $term->name = get_english_version($term->term_id);<br />        }<br />    }<br />    return $terms;<br />}, 10, 4);

This code checks if you are in the admin area and modifies the term names to their English versions for specific taxonomies. Note that you might need to define the function

get_english_version

to fetch the English names based on term IDs. For further customization, you may consider hiring a developer from our contractors' page.

If this solution does not apply to your case, or if it seems outdated, please check the related known issues and confirm that you have installed the latest versions of themes and plugins. If the issue persists, we highly recommend opening a new support ticket for personalized assistance.

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Last updated by Bruno Kos 1 month, 2 weeks ago.

Assisted by: Bruno Kos.

Author Posts
May 1, 2025 at 6:09 pm #16987196

josephG-17

Background of the issue:
I have a site under development with two languages: English and Arabic. The default language is English. I have translated my taxonomies to Arabic, and they appear correctly on the front end.

Symptoms:
When creating a post in Arabic, the taxonomies display in Arabic on the post creation page, but I want them to display in English.

Questions:
How can I display taxonomies in English on the backend while creating a post in Arabic?

May 2, 2025 at 3:16 pm #16990147

Bruno Kos
WPML Supporter since 12/2018

Languages: English (English ) German (Deutsch ) French (Français )

Timezone: Europe/Zagreb (GMT+02:00)

Hi,

There is no such option in WPML. Forcing the admin interface to be in English while editing Arabic posts and showing only English taxonomy terms — while maintaining front-end translations — is not standard behavior and would require complex custom filtering and overriding default translation behavior.

So perhaps something like this may work:

add_filter('get_terms', function($terms, $taxonomies, $args, $term_query) {
    if (is_admin() && in_array('person_type', $taxonomies)) {
        foreach ($terms as $term) {
            // You can hard-code or map to English equivalents
            $term->name = get_english_version($term->term_id);
        }
    }
    return $terms;
}, 10, 4);

But such feature would have to be coded by our https://wpml.org/contractors/, as it falls outside of the support scope.