[Escalated to 2nd Tier] Various issues when updating old content

Hi,

Would you be willing to share your WordPress credentials so I can investigate the issue directly?

I’d like to begin by debugging the problem shown in the first video, as that may help clarify what’s happening in the other cases as well. I’ll also review our translation system to understand why only some languages remained unchanged while others require updates, as shown in these screenshots. I’ll check this specifically on the Lafayette Gallery Photo page.

For your reference, here is our privacy and security policy regarding the sharing of debug information:
https://wpml.org/purchase/support-policy/privacy-and-security-when-providing-debug-information-for-support/

I’ve marked your next reply as private so you can safely include the credentials.

Kind regards,
Bruno Kos

We noticed that two different editing systems are being used on the site: Elementor and the standard WordPress editor (Gutenberg). While this is possible, mixing these editors on the same content can sometimes cause unexpected issues behind the scenes.

In this case, the page appears to have been originally created or partially managed with Elementor, but later edited using Gutenberg. When this happens, WordPress may change the internal structure of the page content. Even if everything looks fine visually, these background changes can affect how translations are stored and recognized.

As a result, the translation system may interpret the page as having changed significantly, which can alter or reset its translation status. There isn’t a single clear trigger we can point to—this may be caused by switching between editors or by background data (custom fields or plugin-related metadata) being modified automatically.

The most reliable way to understand exactly what changed is to compare the site data from before and after the issue occurred.

To help troubleshoot this more efficiently, I would like to use a tool called Duplicator hidden link to create a temporary diagnostic copy of the website.

Using this tool, I will generate a lightweight package that contains only the database and essential site files. All media files (such as images and videos) will be excluded to keep the package small and secure.

This package will be used only in a secure local testing environment to reproduce the problem and analyze it in detail. This allows me to safely test fixes without touching or impacting your live website in any way. Your production site will not be modified, slowed down, or affected during this process.

You can find more information about this approach here:
https://wpml.org/faq/checklist-before-opening-a-ticket-in-wpml-support/#get-help-from-support

Please let me know if this is okay, and I’ll proceed with the next steps.

I was able to create packages.

This has been escalated to our 2nd tier team team and may take some debugging time, I'll get back to you as soon as I have any news or questions for you.

You can continue working on your site, as we’ll debug the issue using a Duplicator copy on our local environment.

We believe there is a general issue with how this page and its translation jobs are currently stored. The behavior suggests that old translation jobs were previously cleaned up or partially removed, leaving behind stale or inconsistent job data. Because of this, when trying to translate the page to Bulgarian, WPML opens the native editor instead of the Advanced Translation Editor.

When checking the existing translation job, we can see that it is stale and no longer synchronized with the page content. For example, the actual post content (first paragraph) is stored as plain text:

The Doha Heritage Village is a place that manages to amaze one with its contrasts. On the one hand, "Katara" is designed to resemble a traditional Qatari merchant village. On the other hand, the entire complex has only been in existence since 2010 and is home to modern art and galleries such as French Galeria Lafayette.

However, the translation job body contains HTML markup:

<p>The <a href="<em><u>hidden link</u></em>">Doha</a> Heritage Village is a place that manages to amaze one with its contrasts. On the one hand, "Katara" is designed to resemble a traditional Qatari merchant village. On the other hand, the entire complex has only been in existence since 2010 and is home to modern art and galleries such as French Galeria Lafayette.</p>

This mismatch indicates the job was created under different editor or parsing conditions and is now outdated. We also noticed that the translation package is detected as “Page builder shortcode strings” but contains 0 strings. Additionally, updating the page does not regenerate the translation package and instead always moves the job to “needs update”, which further points to corrupted or incomplete translation data.

On our side, we resolved this by removing all existing translation jobs for the affected page directly from the database, adding a translator for Bulgarian, and resending the page for translation from the Translation Management dashboard. This forced WPML to create a completely new job, after which the Advanced Translation Editor opened correctly and the translation worked as expected.

The SQL used to remove the old jobs was:

DELETE
FROM wp_icl_translate
WHERE job_id IN (10937,11512,12087,12660,13245,13820,14395,14970,19943,19944,19945,19946,19947,19948,19949,19950,19951,19952,19953,19954,19955,19956,19957,19958,19959,19960,19961,19962,19963,19964,19965,19966,19967,19968,19969,19970);

DELETE
FROM wp_icl_translate_job
WHERE job_id IN (10937,11512,12087,12660,13245,13820,14395,14970,19943,19944,19945,19946,19947,19948,19949,19950,19951,19952,19953,19954,19955,19956,19957,19958,19959,19960,19961,19962,19963,19964,19965,19966,19967,19968,19969,19970);

What we recommend is always sending the page for translation from the Translation Management dashboard so a fresh job is created. Since the site is currently migrating from Divi to Gutenberg and planning to use Elementor, finalizing which editor is used will help WPML correctly detect the page structure and prevent this issue from recurring.

Could you please check this on your side and try resending the page for translation as described above, and let us know if this resolves the issue for you?