Sorry to bother you again with link translations, but we're having a lot of issues with it.
This time we have pages where we had already translated internal links (pointing to pages within the website) from English to German. The links still look fine on the frontend German page, so WPML does have the translated link stored somewhere.
But in the advanced translation editor, when I search for "http", the link that looks fine in the frontend is blank; there is no translation here. How do I get it back in the editor?
I cleared all the caches I could think of to see if that would help, but it didn't.
If you've already tried this and still have no clue to fix this, I would need to take a closer look at your site. So I would need to request temporary access (WP-Admin and FTP) preferably to a test site where the problem has been replicated if possible in order to be of better help and check if some configurations might need to be changed
Your following answer will be private, which means only you and I have access to it.
✙ I would need your permission to de-activate and re-activate Plugins and the Theme and to change configurations on the site if required. This is also a reason the backup is critical.
I've checked and I can see the issue you had there.
I've checked the link here hidden link and looked at the Advanced Translation Editor. You mentioned that "It will list all 8 external and internal links, but none of them has a translated value. Why is that?" .
May I know how did you translate the links earlier? Did you manually edit the links directly on the translated German language page?
I need to know what you did earlier to translate the links so that I could try to replicate this on your end.
My colleague manually translated the links. She most likely copied the link from the browser and pasted it there. In some cases she fully types them.
I'm now thinking if this is perhaps caused by the issue discussed here: https://wpml.org/forums/topic/all-internal-links-translation-were-gone/. Apparently, the ATE forgets all link translations of the post if you accidentally "translate" an English link to the original value. From that support ticket, we learned that we should translate the English to German links, and not touch the other links at all.
But it's impossible for me to know in which posts we made the above mistake. Which is actually a bug I guess, because WPML should not throw away translations.
Despite all of this, the links are fine in the frontend so WPML did store the translations somewhere, but not in the ATE. I hope we can get them back into the ATE somehow. What do you think?
Sorry, I need further clarification about this. You mentioned that "My colleague manually translated the links. She most likely copied the link from the browser and pasted it there.".
If you edited the link outside of the "Advanced Translation Editor", then the links will not be saved or displayed in the "Advanced Translation Editor".
But if you edit the link inside the "Advanced Translation Editor", the links will be saved.
No problem Kor. We always do our translations inside the Advanced Translation Editor. That's why I feel that losing translations should not be possible. Even if we accidentally use the English URL as a link translation for one of the links.
Thanks for your reply. Ok, this shouldn't be happening.
Let's try to replicate on a new test page so that I could escalate it for further assistance from our 2nd Tier Support. C
Could you please create a new page and list the steps to replicate the issue ( the ATE forgets all link translations of the post if you accidentally "translate" an English link to the original value).
If possible, please record a short screen recording of what you did to replicate the issue. You can use this free tool hidden link
I've spent a lot of time but so far I haven't been able to reproduce this on purpose. Even if I copy English URLs into the translated value, the issue did not occur. I have absolutely no clue at the moment what is causing this. We did lose a lot of translated links though, not an occasional one here and there. It's mysterious.
I will keep an eye on it and let you know if I find anything useful. Please keep this thread open and let me know if you find anything.
As I've mentioned earlier, a translated link will be saved if it's translated using the "Advanced Translation Editor". So the issue seems to be isolated somewhere with your setup.
I got a message that this thread will be closed in 3 days. But it will take much longer for us to go through the links again and figure out if the problem occurs again, and why.
I checked my test page but the translated link is still there. I'll report back here once I have more info.
