Hi,
Please look at this page in English: hidden link
Which I translated into German:hidden link
Together with the attached screenshot.
Many times on this page and on many other pages across my website, I have internal links to urls that look like this "machiningdoctor.com/mds/?matId=xxxx" (xxx is a number that varies).
On translated pages, all of them should be transformed to "machiningdoctor.com/de/mds/?matId=xxxx"
In the given example, I changed all of them manually. I tried to add to the Glossary /mds?==>/de/mds? but it dot work.
I am looking to automate (Or semi-automate) it because I am starting with the translation of the site and there will be many similar cases.
Thank you for contacting WPML support. While you are waiting for one of my colleagues to take this ticket and work on it, let me provide you with the first debugging steps or if I can help with the issue quickly.
WPML can automatically update internal links to point to the translated content.
Go to WPML > Settings > Translate Link Targets and run the scan.
(See the screenshot.)
When there is new content with links that need updating, you should see a small info box at the top of the WPML > Settings page.
With that said, I'm not sure about the URL structure (mds?matid) and whether it would work as expected.
Please give that a try and let us know how it goes.
How are you getting on? Did scanning the link targets fix the problem?
I ran a quick check on my local test site to confirm that internal links are still handled correctly during translation if they contain added URL parameters, and they were, but if you are still facing problems let me know.
I am looking for a solution that each time WPML encounters the link machiningdoctor.com/mds/, On any existing and future pages, it will translate it to machiningdoctor.com/de/mds/ (Or machiningdoctor.com/es/mds/), depending on the language.
Is there a way to do it?
What is the best way to handle this scenario?
This is what I did, that does not work: (See screenshots of each step)
1) Added the URL to the glossary. (Glossary.jpg)
2) Search in the translation editor for the string mds. The URL's are found when I hover above "mds" and a tooltip appears with the glossary translation (Step 1.jpg)
3) But when I click it, the string does not replace it. (Step 2.jpg)
4) Also, if it would replace, it is still a manual task. I expected the glossary to replace the string automatically
Translating internal links is handled automatically, and you really shouldn't have to do anything at all for them to work.
(External links are essentially just copied, so if you included a link to google.com and you wanted that to be to google.de on the German page you would need to translate the link manually.)
Just to be clear about one thing: if your staging server had links with URLs from the production server, they would be considered external links.
Now, take a look at the screenshot from my own test site, where I'm translating a post that includes a link to the sample-page that I also added a URL parameter to for testing.
Ordinarily link URLs are hidden from the editor, because there is no need to translate them (internal links, at least) and if you don't then everything will be handled automatically when it comes to displaying the correct links on the front end.
In my screenshot, as in yours, you can see the link url, but only because I used the search box to help locate it. But actually, I shouldn't translate it, and I should just make sure when translating the text if came from that the link is applied to the correct part of the text. (See the documentation here for more about these HTML markers in the ATE editor: https://wpml.org/documentation/translating-your-contents/advanced-translation-editor/#html-markers.)
When I mark the translation as complete—without translating the link URL—then everything works correctly on the front end.
In this case the original front-end link to Sample Page (hidden link) is automatically updated to point to the translation of that page at hidden link on the translated post.
So I would suggest you remove translations of the URLs that you have added so far and let WPML handle updating them automatically.
Hi,
I tried to follow your instructions.
I created a test page: hidden link
It has 3 link
1) Linking to a page that was already translated into German.
2) Linking to a page that had not been translated yet.
3) linking to the above-discussed link hidden link
All the links are internal and belong to the staging copy.
I ran the page thru the translation editor and did the automatic translation.
All the links were simply copied and not transformed to the German page.
You can see the results here: hidden link
That test page you described, I visited it (and the original English version) and the first and third links should be automatically transformed to point to the corresponding translated pages.
I can't see why that isn't happening without checking the process myself.
Would it be possible to access the back end of the site and do some testing and debugging?
Let me mark your next reply as private so that I can get log-in credentials from you—you may want to create a temporary admin user for me to use that you can later delete. And be sure to have a current backup of your site.
I just translated the same test page to Spanish, and got the same result, and now I can see why.
The pages that "already have a translation" being linked to have draft status, they are not published. When logged in as an administrator I can see the different language versions of the page about the machinability of cast iron you linked to, for example, but if I visit the same page logged out then I can only see the English original because the other language versions are not published.
And WPML won't update links in translations to point to pages that are unpublished.
When I went to WPML > Translations I see that content is translated but pending review, hence why they remain as drafts.
When you link to pages that have actual published translations then those links should be handled automatically, as described before.
(Note I'm not actually working today but didn't want to leave you without a reply. If you still have problems once you have reviewed and published translations, I'll get back to you with further help on Monday.)
Many thanks for helping out on your free day. You are much appreciated!
I understood your explanation, and it seems logical.
I did careful testing accordingly on the same staging copy to check it.
1) I created a new post in English: hidden link
2) That post included 3 links:
A) To URL hidden link
I made sure that it was translated into German and that the translation was published.
B) To a URL that did not have a translation.
C) to the URL with the paramters: hidden link
Also, here, I made sure that this page is translated into German and published.
4) I sent the page to automatic translation and published it. (hidden link)
5) To my disappointment, all the links remained pointing to the English version.
6) I did "Scan now and adjust links" - But after the scan was finished, it reported that zero links were found.
OK, I checked back on your site, and this is odd, it's not behaving how it should, now that we've identified the problem with translations being published or not.
I'll keep looking into why. I will likely need to install some utility plugins to help with debugging; you said I could play around with this staging site copy.
Just to keep you up-to-date, I need to do some code tracing to track what happens when the translation is returned from the translation editor (which is when the link swapping should occur), and I can only do that locally, so I am taking a copy to work on.
I'll update you later when I've gone through that.
Further update: the locally-installed copy of your site works as expected, the links are automatically updated, so the problem seems to only occur on your server.
So I am back to working on the staging site to search for the cause.
Unfortunately it is harder to debug remotely, but I am persisting, and will get back to you.
I dug down into the minutae of the code on your staging server, only to discover that the problem was somewhat trivial.
The settings for your site URLs are wrong, they use http protocol even though the site actually uses https protocol.
That is something that will affect matching links for translation.
I changed the settings on the staging site I've been working on and found it now works as expected.
Can you please check your sites on other servers.
You will likely want to go to WPML > Settings > Translate Link Targets and run the scan to fix links, which should work for existing links once you have updated the WordPress URLs correctly.
