British English translations for Posts have historically been created via manual content duplication from the English source.
What happened
When I published two new English posts, WPML automatically created British English (en-GB) versions of those posts — despite the following:
"Translate Everything Automatically" is OFF on the live site
I did not manually duplicate or create the en-GB versions
No automatic translation engine was used
The problem
The auto-generated British English posts contain the wrong content. Instead of mirroring their actual English source posts, all en-GB posts received the title and content of an entirely different, older post: "Building Profitable Partnerships: A Partner-First Guide to Selling Video Telematics."
The two newer English posts are:
"Basic Hardware vs. Programmable Hardware: When Technical Capability Defines Business Return"
"The market still buys trackers as a cost. Leaders buy information."
Their en-GB counterparts both incorrectly display the title and content of post #3: "Building Profitable Partnerships: A Partner-First Guide to Selling Video Telematics."
Current WPML settings
Translation mode: Translate What You Choose (NOT Translate Everything Automatically)
Post Types Translation for Posts: Translatable — only show translated items
Default language: English
Secondary languages: British English, Spanish
What I need help understanding
Why were en-GB posts created automatically when "Translate Everything Automatically" is disabled and I did not initiate duplication or translation?
Why do the en-GB posts contain content from a different English source post rather than their actual linked English source?
Are the trid values in wp_icl_translations corrupted? I suspect the new posts were assigned to the wrong translation group, linking them to the older post instead of their correct English sources.
Additional context
This same behavior also occurred on a dev/staging copy of the site.
I am aware that English → British English is not a supported automatic translation pair since both resolve to the same base language. My normal workflow is to manually duplicate English content into en-GB via the Translation Dashboard.
This does sound like some sort corruption because it is not expected and WPML by itself would not auto generate random content.
When you go to pages, do you see any pages in trash?
Also, the pages connected to the new content you created, do they have a default language they should have been connected to that still exists?
Please go to WPML->Support->Troubleshooting and run the following actions:
- Clear WPML cache
- Remove Ghost Entries from the translation tables (possibly what caused the issue here actually)
- Set language information
- Cleanup and optimize string tables
Hey Bobby, thanks so much for the assist. There are currently no pages or posts in the trash. The default language is English. British English is based on this language in my site. I built the source pages in the default English. Those languages all still exist.
I performed all the steps in the Troubleshooting page as directed on a development version of the website. I created a new default English post. This time, the expected workflow occurred. I saved the draft of the new post and nothing was created automatically. As a test, I also hit Publish on this new post and luckily it is the same, nothing automatically generated as is preferred in this instance.
I reverted the test post back to draft status as opposed to published.
To take the test to the next logical step, I used the Duplicate feature of post translation to create the British version. Saved the original English draft again just in case. Reviewed the British English page list and we seem to be good to go.
I will perform the same tests on the live site when I have an opportunity. Is there any reason for concern with running any of the Troubleshooting steps on a live website?
Thank you for updating me and glad to hear the results were not reproducible, there is no cause for concern to run the troubleshooting steps on a live site, however, we always do recommend having a backup in place before making any major changes or troubleshooting actions.
