Background of the issue:
We are experiencing an issue with WPML on our website, which is built using Elementor. Our core site is in English, and we've used WPML to translate all pages into German. The marketing team has been manually updating translations directly through Elementor due to some grammar and sentence structure issues in the initial translations.
Symptoms:
Despite setting WPML to 'manual translation only,' the plugin seems to override or alter the translations that have been manually updated in Elementor, leading to inconsistencies and unexpected changes in our German pages.
Questions:
Could it be that translations made through Elementor are not being properly recognized by WPML?
Is it necessary to make these updates exclusively through the WPML Translation Management Dashboard for them to stick?
Thank you for contacting WPML Support. When you translate a page using the Advanced Translation Editor (ATE), the content is saved both in your site’s database and in ATE’s translation memory. However, if you edit the translation using the default WordPress Editor, the changes are saved only in the site’s database, and ATE’s translation memory is not updated.
- When you view the page on the frontend, it pulls content from the site’s database. However, if you open the page in ATE, it will load content from ATE’s translation memory. This means any manual changes made using the default WordPress Editor won’t be reflected in ATE, potentially causing those changes to be lost.
- We recommend sticking to one type of translation editor for consistency. If you are using WPML’s Translation Editor, continue editing the translations within that editor to avoid any conflicts or data loss.
- If you prefer to use the default WordPress Editor for certain pages and no longer wish to use WPML Translation Editor for those, you can disable the Translation Editor on a per-page basis by following these steps:
1. Open the default language page in Edit mode.
2. In the Languages metabox, disable the WPML Translation Editor for that specific page as you can see in the attached screenshot.
3. Now, when you edit the translated page, it will open in the default WordPress Editor and your manually updated changes will remain as it is.