Background of the issue:
I am using the WPML paid plugin on our WooCommerce site, which supports six languages: English, Mandarin, French, German, Russian, and Spanish. Our website contains approximately 300 pages and over 2,500 products, and we plan to add more products. We disabled certain settings under WPML → Settings → Media Translation to prevent media attachments from being duplicated across all languages.
Symptoms:
Despite disabling media duplication settings, media attachments are still being translated and duplicated across all languages when using WPML Automatic Translation, causing a significant increase in database size. The database size is currently 4.48 GB, with the wp_icl_translate table at 1.32 GB and the wp_icl_translation_status table at 1.27 GB. This has caused the site to stop functioning properly.
Questions:
How can we ensure that media attachments are not translated or duplicated when using automatic translation?
Is there a way to configure WPML so that only pages are automatically translated, while products are excluded?
Languages: English (English )German (Deutsch )French (Français )
Timezone: Europe/Zagreb (GMT+02:00)
Since you've disabled these settings, images should no longer be duplicated for new media items.
However, these database tables are not large solely because of media translations — they likely account for only a small portion of the total size. The main thing is that you have quite a few languages and a large number of products, so it's expected that these tables would contain a significant amount of data.
