Languages: English (English )Spanish (Español )Italian (Italiano )
Timezone: Europe/Rome (GMT+02:00)
Hello,
Could you please check the credentials, when I access the site, it tells me that the user you had given me before doesn't even exist 🙁
Another question: where are you based or what are your usual working hours? I'd like to see if I can rearrange my work in a way that I can offer you a faster support.
Languages: English (English )Spanish (Español )Italian (Italiano )
Timezone: Europe/Rome (GMT+02:00)
The credential fields are enabled in this new reply and thank you for letting me know your time. I can see that we're quite far apart but I'll try to reduce the back and forth as much as I can and will dedicate the overlapping hours with you as my main priority to increase speed.
Languages: English (English )Spanish (Español )Italian (Italiano )
Timezone: Europe/Rome (GMT+02:00)
I saw what you mean and I totally understand now why you think it's out of sync. Check this video here, please: hidden link
The problem is the original language of the page! when you have the "translate everything automatically" feature enabled, you can translate from the default language of your site into any target languages. the feature will do it automatically but you'll also be able to translate even "manually" in the same way, from english to spanish.
In fact if you make changes to the original page when its language is Spanish, then you won't have it automatically translated either.
If the original language of the page matches the default language of the site, then you'll see the button and you'll also see the automatic translation working normally for those pages. you make any change to it and it automatically will translate it.
This is done as a security feature because otherwise you could potentially end up overwriting the pages and ultimately spending more.
I reviewed your video and while it makes sense that the site would behave this way if we created content in Spanish, it strikes me as very strange that the platform thinks any of the pages were originally created in Spanish.
Every Spanish page on the site was generated by the WPML translation queue from an English (original) version. So no Spanish page should behave as if it's the original language on the entire site.
Is there any reason the platform might think that the original language of a page would be in Spanish when it was originally in English?
Hi there - just an aside here. I've noticed that the site keeps trying to re-translate entire pages and has been taking thousands of credits out of our account when I attempt to correctly reassign the Spanish translations as the translated page and not the other way around. Is there any way to reverse these charges? The automatic translation process is re-translating existing pages and making new copies of them.
This happens in many instances, however the most recent one was when I went into the "Tooling" page. I needed to take down an accordion item from the page for the client. I noticed the Spanish version did not make this change. When I went into the English version it said it was a translation of the "utillaje" page (which is the opposite - utillaje is the translation of the "tooling" page). I selected "none" tin the "this is a tranlation of:" dropdown and immediately the platform created a new draft of the translation of this page before I could try getting the Spanish page to remember it was supposed to be a translation of this page.
It's a huge mess and I do not want the client's account getting charged while we troubleshoot these issues.
Languages: English (English )Spanish (Español )Italian (Italiano )
Timezone: Europe/Rome (GMT+02:00)
Hello,
You mention:
it strikes me as very strange that the platform thinks any of the pages were originally created in Spanish.
When I see the revisions, I can clearly see that the sustainability page was created In English and the Spanish one was created 2 months ago, However, I can only suspect that the pages maybe were created not with the editor but manually and were then linked together or something like that (or they were imported with a plugin, maybe?). Either that or at one point they were unlinked so they appeared to be independent, and then linked again setting Spanish as the main language.
I can assure you that was not the plugin doing it by itself because that action is not something that can be done automatically, it requires manual/human work to achieve and it's more of a workflow situation than anything so I can't really know for sure what happened or how it happened here.
----------------------------
I've noticed that the site keeps trying to re-translate entire pages and has been taking thousands of credits out of our account when I attempt to correctly reassign the Spanish translations as the translated page and not the other way around.
You have setup all the pages to be automatically translated via WPML > Translation Management, so it's expected that as soon as the platform encounters "new" or "updated" content, it translates it. that's literally all that feature does: keep everything translated automatically (as briefly explained on the feature itself, right below the activation switch).
When you unlink a language, that page becomes independent, thus a "new" page, It's published so it gets translated right away. To avoid this, Please go to WPML > Translation management and then disable "Translate everything automatically" or set the pages as draft first since our feature only works with published pages.
Also, Please know that a translation ES > EN is not the same as an EN > ES so you will eventually have to translate it again if you make an edit to it.
I returned 5000 credits, although when I checked you had only spent 154 credits. I only saw one page on our transactions, if there were others, maybe they were already translated in the past and you didn't get charged because of it.
If you have any question or doubt, ask me, don't worry and we can find a way to have everything fixed 🙂
"I can assure you that was not the plugin doing it by itself because that action is not something that can be done automatically, it requires manual/human work to achieve and it's more of a workflow situation than anything so I can't really know for sure what happened or how it happened here."
I don't know what to tell you - that simply isn't the case. The English version of that page was built out years ago and only recently did we run it through the translator. It's possible that going into the Spanish version of the page after it was generated to fix broken elements caused the translator to somehow think that because we were editing a Spanish page, it reversed its orientation to think the Spanish page was the original? In any case, I would recommend looking into how this could happen if you're not sure "what happened or how it happened here" - this is a massive issue for our site and one that has happened on multiple pages. We need to be sure that the translation is only 1 direction: es>en. If there's anything in the system that reverses this, it's going to cause us massive issues down the road. We'll need to make sure to avoid whatever behavior caused it. It shouldn't happen accidentally without explicit intention.
For now, whenever I try to manually relink two versions of a page, I'll disable the automatic translation option. There are partial links that exist between pages (i.e. the hreflang still directs you to the translated copy of the page) but where the translation tables are gone or the primary and translated copies are reversed in the system. To fix these, I have had to go through manually unlinking them then going through the process to relink translated pages. However, unlinking them has caused the unlinked English page to immediately generate a new Spanish copy, which causes massive chaos - it charges the account credits for the translation - the only way to relink the English page to the original Spanish translation is to completely delete the newly generated one first and even then, I had to dig through your support pages to find ways to make the "connect to translated page" option appear in the page editor again. If I just turn off the automatic translation, I should be able to avoid these issues.
As for the credits - thank you for adding in those credits - I know I must have burned through a huge amount while troubleshooting the two staging sites and the live site and these are owned and purchased by the client, so I appreciate your assistance there. I don't want the client coming down on me for wasting their credits.
