[Resolved] Unfinished Translation

Dear Andreas,

No, it was absolutely not possible to set the markers in the same way—and for a very good reason. In the translation from English to French, some elements of the original text became redundant and were naturally omitted. For example:

Original: “The Open Recognition (Reconnaissance Ouverte) is about…”
Translation: “La Reconnaissance Ouverte est…”

In such cases, the text in parentheses—and its italics—simply don’t belong in the translation. Including those markers would not only be awkward, but also misleading in the target language.

On top of that, the UI does little to help identify where the issue lies. I had to go through each field manually, copying and comparing line by line to locate the discrepancy.

Frankly, it’s not up to a robot to decide whether a translation is valid—especially not when we’re talking about non-breaking spaces or italic tags. It shouldn’t force the translator or author to spend hours debugging formatting issues that could be solved with a simple, human-readable warning.

What’s more inconsistent is that I can save a translation if I paste the full English text into the French version—even if nothing has been translated. But if a single tag is missing or used differently, saving is blocked—even though WPML doesn’t verify whether those tags are being used meaningfully or correctly.

This feels more like a bug than a feature. If you fix this, you’ll save users and translators a lot of time—and probably make them much happier too. 😊

Warm regards,
Serge

Are you reading what I wrote?

When you write "If this is causing an issue on the site" you are misrepresenting the problem which is: it's not for an automaton to decide if the translation is good enough or not or if the "style break" is a problem or not.

It is for the user to make the decision, and what you write is: we (WPML) are right, and you (the user) are wrong. You (the user) have no right to decide whether the translation is good enough and if the style break is or isn't a problem. We (WPML) know better than you (the user).

WPML is a great product, but it would be even better if you listened to the users and stoped violating a basic rule in UX:
* give the users a choice
* provide a warning, e.g. that the translation is not complete
* don't block the user who wants to save a translation that it finds good enough

The current behaviour is particularly insulting to the intelligence of the user...

I lost the page that created the problem. I'll come back when it occurs again. Now I have another problem with credits...