Background of the issue:
I have translated the website with ATE and automatic translation using WPML AI. For some reason, there are many places where the ampersand (&) symbol doesn’t appear in the translation. The issue can be seen on this page: hidden link. In the link I provided, the text on the top should be 'Corporate & Workplace Nutrition Wellness'. There are other cases like this hidden link where the title should have been 'Woman & Child' but the & disappeared after the automatic translation.
Symptoms:
The ampersand (&) symbol doesn’t appear in the translation, resulting in extra spaces where the symbol should be. In the ATE, the & symbol exists in the first link, but in the "woman child" it disappeared.
Questions:
Why does the ampersand (&) symbol disappear in the translation?
How can I ensure the ampersand (&) symbol appears correctly in translations?
For additional testing, can you please temporarily switch to a different translation service engine such as Google, create a test page that includes an & symbol and translate the page. Does the & display if you use a different translation service?
If not, please try these steps. Please be sure to make a full backup of your site and database.
Then, go to WPML -> Support -> Troubleshooting.
Look for 'Clean up' and click the following:
- Synchronize posts taxonomies
- Clear the cache in WPML
- Remove ghost entries from the translation tables
- Fix element_type collation
- Set language information
- Synchronize local job IDs
- Fix Terms count
- Fix post assignment for translations
I have a test site set up with WPML AI translation service enabled. WHen I try to test auto translating a Greek page to English, I get this message:
"The site's default language Greek doesn't support automatic translation."
Did you have backup translation services enabled in your site? You mentioned you used automatic translation and Greek was default - or did I get that wrong?
Feel free to use the test site I set up and run some tests there to see if we can reproduce the issue. This link will automatically log you in: hidden link
This is some kind of bug on your end, Greek is supported as you can see here hidden link
It can also be seen from the usage reports, and also I have contacted support for a different issue, again related to WPML AI, which was resolved and they never mentioned Greek not being supported.
While I was typing this message, I did some testing and found the bug:
- I went to WPML -> Languages
- changed the "Language mapping" for Greek to something different but DIDN'T click save
- changed it back to Greek, then clicked the "Save" button
- clicked it and voila, error is gone.
So this is a different bug I guess, something is not stored correctly and has to be saved again.
I resolved that issue with mapping Greek by enabling the additional translation service engines. Do you only have WPML AI translation service enabled on your site, or do you have any backup translation engines enabled?
At the moment I only have WPML AI, and actually today I automatically translated two posts with it.
I don't know why it doesn't work like that for your website and you need to have additional translation engines. Obviously there must be some kind of bug, seems it works fine for me and Greek is supported.
I'm not able to reproduce the & issue in a clean install. Do you have a staging site where I can log in and test with minimal settings, and install the Adminer plugin so I can look at the database? If not, you can create one using something like WP Staging, or I can set one up on our cloudways server and migrate a copy of your site there.
Sorry for the delay, I didn't notice that you had answered me.
It's not easy to create a staging website for this project as it is more than 20gb in size.
If you can setup a test project with the same WPML settings and with WP Bakery, I can try to replicate the issue. If you don't have WPBakery, I can install it.
Alright, after 5 hours of debugging I think I'm getting somewhere.
1. I created a completely new post, with the problematic text that contains the & symbol. I translated it, and the & symbol worked correctly (appears both on ATE and the page).
2. I enabled ACF, created a custom WYSIWYG field for posts. I set it to "translate".
3. I went and edited the post from step 1, added some text to the custom field and saved.
4. Weird behavior after that. Sometimes the & symbol disappeared, sometimes the translation didn't appear at all.
5. I tried this in YOUR setup, with the default theme and without WPBakery, and managed to replicate it. Check the following post:
Greek: hidden link
English: hidden link
If you click on the English translation, the Greek language shows up. However if you check ATE, the text is 100% translated.
Thanks for the assist with troubleshooting. I tried recreating your steps but did not have the same results. I create two new test posts. Both work as expected with both showing the translation and the ampersand. In your test post, you'll notice that the main content does not even show up on the WPML editor, and when you make changes to the page, it does not reflect an update for WPML translations. So something definitely seems "off" on your test post.
Please see the test posts I created. Are you able to reproduce the issue on either of these posts? I also added the custom field content but it didn't break anything on my test posts.
