Background of the issue:
I am trying to prevent slugs from being translated on my site hidden link.
Symptoms:
I don't want slugs to be translated.
Questions:
when sending translations for auto translation, the translated version urls should not be translated, because it messes up. I don't want this hidden link
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 first debugging steps or if I can perhaps help with the issue quickly. There are options in the WPML -> Settings for how to handle the page slug. You can set it to Copy from Title, Copy from Translation, or use the encoded URLs which is what it looks like is selected now. I suggest first keeping it set as translated so that you can fix any of the slugs that are incorrect. Simply copy and paste the URL from the original language as the "translation". Once those are complete, then you can change the settings to Copy and any new pages/posts that are created should copy the post slug to the translation.
Please let us know if you need any further assistance and we will be happy to help.
This feature affects how WPML handles URLs in content and fields when the secondary language uses URL-encoding.
Some languages/scripts (Arabic, Chinese, Cyrillic, Hebrew, etc.) can’t always be used directly in “pretty” permalinks. WordPress falls back to percent-encoded slugs (e.g., %d7%aa%d7%95%d7%9b%d7%9f instead of /תוכן/).
The Translation Editor normally expects you to provide a translated version of every URL. But in these languages, URLs are not human-readable — they’re encoded strings.
With this option enabled, WPML says:
“If the target language produces encoded URLs, don’t ask the translator to enter one — just reuse (copy) the original URL from the source language.”
So instead of seeing a bunch of %20-style encoded slugs to translate, WPML will automatically keep the source link intact.
There are two steps you need to take to avoid having the Japanese slug look like this: hidden link
1. In WPML -> Settings -> Page URL, select the option 'Copy from original language if translation language uses encoded URLs' and click the Save button. (As I understand, this is already done on your site.)
2. In WPML -> Languages -> Edit languages (link), you need to select Yes for the Japanese language, and click the Save button. Please see the attached screenshot.
Then the Japanese page will have this slug, for example: hidden link.
You may want to do the same for all the other encoded languages on your site. Languages like Chinese, Korean, and Arabic.
Please let me know if you have any further questions.
With the copy of your site on my local server, it worked. I got this slug for the Japanese product after applying the needed settings and updating the Japanese product: /ja/shop/360マーケティング&ブランディング/full-service-marketing/. You can see that /full-service-marketing/ has been copied over from German, the original language of this product.
I just checked your site, and it seems you did not apply this step I mentioned:
In WPML -> Languages -> Edit languages (link), you need to select Yes for the Japanese language and click the Save button.
Please see the attached screenshot. You need to change it to Yes and click the Save button. Then you need to update the existing translations. For new translations, it should work when you translate the product.