Hello, your transalation screen shows translated strings not correctly. it shows sometimes the source string in the translated field. See screenshots. And in addition, the frontend is not showing the same strings as shown in the translation screen, see screenshot.
I do not know, if this is related to the other errors, but there are issues with the "&" sign as well. Some translations do not pick up the sign from the editor.
To troubleshoot this, could you please try the following:
- Make a small change to the default (original) title/content
- Save the changes
- Re-send the content for translation and complete the translation again
Before doing this, please also make sure to:
- Clear/disable any caching (plugins, server cache, object cache, etc.)
- Temporarily disable any performance or optimization plugins
After that, check if the issue persists.
If the problem still occurs, it might be related to your custom theme. In that case, please try switching temporarily to a default theme (such as Twenty Twenty-Four), re-translate the content, and check the result.
Let me know how it goes and we’ll continue from there.
Setup: there is not caching or any other "performance" plugin used
But I'm sure you know that too, on shared hosts, there are limited options to set for OPCache etc., so WPML looks like the problem here to me. And honestly, do I not see the problem at site level, because the translation screen comes from the wpml.org subdomain - right?
I did your test, but it happens again as stated in the error reports. I change a german text, do to the FR Translation, got your content compare screen, but some items, like the apersand sign is not working. The content in FR simply is not including it in the source code.
And the theme used, well, it's a really basic classic setup. We never had problems with WPML when translated independently - but with automatic translations, we got all these listed problems and in the mean time, we found other ones. Like if the source language has a link on a list item, and there are multiple items, the editor shows the last 2 items with not link at all.
So currently we are really not happy with this situation, on a client site.
Thank you for the detailed explanation, I understand your concerns.
I agree there are multiple issues mentioned, but to properly investigate and avoid confusion, I suggest we focus on one issue at a time and resolve them step by step.
For now, let’s concentrate on the specific problem with the missing characters (e.g. the ampersand) or content discrepancies in the translation.
To properly test this, it would be best if I could check the issue directly, preferably on a staging environment. This would allow me to:
- Safely run tests
- Temporarily switch to a default theme
- Confirm whether the issue is related to the theme or something else
Even if the setup seems simple, small differences in how content (like list items or links) is generated can affect how WPML parses and sends it for translation.
Once we isolate and resolve this first issue, we can then move on to the others.
Let me know if you can provide access to a staging site, and I’ll take a closer look.
I’ve checked the issue on your Home page and was able to re-translate the content successfully.
What I did:
- Made a small change to the title and saved the page
- Opened the translation editor
- Reviewed all translation segments and ensured they are completed (all green)
- Confirmed the progress bar shows 100%
In your case, a few segments were still marked as “needs update” (flagged). This is related to a known issue from earlier, and the fix is to manually review those segments, remove the flag, and save again.
Once everything reached 100% and was saved, the translation displayed correctly on the frontend: hidden link
Could you please check on your side and confirm that everything looks correct now?
If all is good, we can proceed to review the next issue as well.
Thanks for checking! But to me, it looks like the "ampersand" case is not happen all over. Sometimes it is show, but sometimes it's not. EN looks okay, but the ampersand case is in FR.
I just did another change in FR on Home, but the ampersand, that is shown in the editor in FR is not shown on the website. In the source code there are 2 spaces between the words, but nothing else.
And do we really have to do a change in the main language to make this work? Normally, I would just enter the FR texts and change a typo. And to my understanding, this should work right away. And this is what happens in the real world. You get a translation, find a typo or a wrong word and do a fix for this - without touching the source language.
Thanks for getting back. Strange that it worked for EN but not for FR.
Regarding editing translations directly you are absolutely right. Normally, once a translation job is completed, you should be able to edit the translation (for example fix a typo) without touching the default language, and it should reflect right away.
In practice, however, we sometimes see cases where the connection to the translation job gets out of sync (for example after staging copies, updates, or edits done in a different way/interface). In those cases, WPML may not properly register the change, which is why making a small change in the default language and re-translating often “resets” things and makes it work again. That’s why I suggested it as a workaround for your example.
That said, since in your case the ampersand is still not showing (even though it is present in the FR editor), we need deeper checking.
I’m not able to reliably fix the ampersand from my side either at this point, so I will escalate this to our team for further investigation and advice.
I’ll update you as soon as I have more information.
