If I switch to the english version of an article from italian, usually I get the right content. On some articles though I get a 301 and redirect to a different article.
Since we hold technical documentation which is reserved to our user base I cannot publish the article. Is there another way to show you that very page?
I have done more research on htis and it looks like the issue here might be in the actual structure of the manual articles.
Let's take this article for example since it has an existing connected translation.
ITALIAN: hidden link
ENGLISH: hidden link
1. Italian works OK and theres a translation attached
2. When switching to the translation WordPress does a 301 redirect because it cannot serve the EN URL.
Since the EN URL ends with en/manuale/semantic-graph-navigator-functional-guide/
WordPress believes that you are instead attempting to access hidden link
which is the ITALIAN version (without the -4), this specific article does not have a translation which is why the language switcher then points back to the /en/ homepage.
3. Now let's try to access the manual article directly.
You can go to hidden link and try to locate it, you will notice that many items are missing such as Contents, and other items.
Also in the backend you can see that Edition and Topics are not tranlsatable.
And overall if you navigate to hidden link
Select 2025.11 you will get an error saying
This item is not in the selected pathway.
How are manual articles created and which plugin is being used? The issue seems to come from the actual pathway rather than a translation problem, when the article is not accessible WordPress then tries to serve what it thinks we are attempting to access.
Hi, I investigated the situation further, also with the help of ChatGPT. It seems that the problem is a phenomenon called ‘permalink fallback’ where WordPress loads an article that has similarity to the requested url. This is to avoid SEO problems, apparently.
In my case, the url
/en/manual/semantic-graph-navigator-functional-guide-4/
loads
/en/manual/semantic-graph-navigator-functional-guide/
but keeps the url unchanged.
Now we don't know where this semantic-graph-navigator-functional-guide-4 came from, because it exists only in Italian.
Probably after the translation with ATE the system creates this temporary url, because it is a clone of the Italian one, and then in publication phasei a manual url is used. We don't know. What do you think? Are there any solutions, settings or tricks that allow me to use only existing urls? Other than attention, I would say?
Oh ok sorry I did not reply.
Manual articles are created by hand, published, and then sent to ATE for translation.
My guess is that they are linked before being published, because sometimes I see this situation:
ENG, we try to load hidden link
it goes 301 to hidden link
if I query the db for semantic-graph-navigator-functional-guide as post_name I see the italian article with that post_name, ok, the english article with that post name but english guid is
dirty, hidden link
italian guid is clean, but wrong hidden link
I extended the admin access for one week.
Thank you
2 - There are 3 article with a similar name, when I translate all 3 then it works OK and the redirects stop.
Semantic Graph Navigator - Functional Guide
There are 3 entries.
hidden link
39771
hidden link
50836
hidden link
51852
When I view them in the backend it shows that they all 3 are missing their translations.
However for ID 39771 I added a translation and it was ID 62069
NOTE: At the moment the English translation needs to be added as it was corrupted and overwritten.
Also, is there a reason these items were set to "manual" translation, rather than ATE? If you decide to use ATE I can add some free credits to cover the re translation of this manual article into English.
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