Background of the issue:
I am trying to create translations for a page originally in English using an Elementor template. The issue can be seen on this page: hidden link
Symptoms:
When I switch the language of the page, the content gets reset to the default language, including images and headings.
Questions:
Why does the translated page content reset to the default language when switching languages?
How can I ensure that the translated content remains in the selected language?
Welcome to the WPML support forum. I tried to visit the website to see the issue but it's password protected.
So here are some general recommendations to translate your Elementor pages:
1. Duplication
- Open the original page in WordPress, in the right sidebar section "Language", make sure that your translation is not a "Duplicate".
Duplicates are an exact copy of your orignal language and will remain synchronized, meaning that any change you make on the translation will always be overwritten by the original content.
For more information about duplication, you can look at this documentation: https://wpml.org/documentation/translating-your-contents/using-different-translation-editors-for-different-pages/
In particular the "Translate independently" screenshot to stop the synchronization.
2. Sometimes the content is not coming directly from the page but from a Elementor template used by the page.
- Make sure that you translate your page and the template
Tutorial: https://wpml.org/documentation/plugins-compatibility/elementor/
section "Translating Elementor Page, Section, Header, Footer Templates and Other Template Types"
3. Check your settings
- Did you change any translation preferences in "WPML > Settings"?
For example I see in your debug info file that ACF Field Groups are translatable when they should be locked as "Don't translate". Changing default "locked" settings may create issues on the site. If the missing translations are related to ACF fields, then that's a good starting point.
I checked the right sidebar on the WordPress backend for the Original page.
The only options that are marked "duplicate" are uploaded media and featured image.
Reference in the screenshot uploaded below.
I have deactivated Password protect on the site for now.
We have translations in 6 languages for this page. All except for the Nepali language seem to get reset with the default content and this has happened twice in this week after we manually changed the content earlier this week.
We have not changed any translation settings recently.
Can you please check and let me know what could be the issue and how we can prevent this from happening again?
Let me know if you need any more details on this or our site info.
Thank you for the screenshot. I can see that you are using the "WordPress editor" for your translation. In that case, because our editor is deactivated, it won't synchronize any content.
Could it be related to your workflow?
- If you switch between our WPML editor and the WordPress editor you may lose translations. Our editor is a professional CAT tool (Computer assisted translation tool) that is hosted outside of your WordPress install, so you could have one version of your page in pur editor and one version in the WordPress editor.
- Another thing to take into consideration is that, when using the WordPress editor to make translation, you will automatically switch to the secondary language to be able to edit the page. From experience, I've seen clients that didn't pay attention to this detail we will be editing the wrong language by mistake (thinking they are working on a certain language when they are working on another). You can easily spot on which language you are working by looking at the flag from the language switcher in your top admin bar. In the same way, don't open different WordPress editor in different languages. If you have two windows with two different languages, your language cookie will be from the last window opened. That could bring the same kind of issues.
If you think that it's not possible that you faced on of those scenarios, don't hesitate to provide me with an admin access and I will have a closer look.
I will activate a private field for your next answer where you can provide credentials safely (this field is only visible by you and the support team). Don't share your own admin account, create a new one that you will delete when we finish troubleshooting.
IMPORTANT: Before we proceed, please backup your site and database.
Thank you for the access. I couldn't find any issue with your translations. However, if you have issues with that particular page, I would recommend to unlink and reconnect all existing translations. This will ensure that any past relationship between the original and the translations are updated.
We followed your steps in the video you provided but after a couple of days, the pages have reverted back to the default language.
The strange part is that, on every page, we have another template to show the Testimonials section. This section remains to be the only thing that is translated properly on all the different languages.
The way in which we have set up the page is -
- Create a page on the English language
- The page content is added using Elementor container and widgets
- Add (+) a translation for the page in another language
- On the translated page, we build using Elementor again and add the same content with the translations.
Can you please check this once and let us know what the issue can be?
Over the last couple of days, a few of our other pages also have this issue suddenly where the content gets reset to the default language.
Please let us know how to resolve this issue soon as it is an urgent matter for us.
Thank you for explaining your workflow. As explained before, if you want to edit your translation manually in the WordPress editor (or here the Elementor editor), you will need to switch off our editor. But I checked that last time and our editor was already deactivated. So I'm not sure it's directly related to WPML here.
When you say that you "add the same content with the translations" do you mean that you rebuild the Elementor page from scratch and add the translations. Or do you copy/paste your content from the original or even overwrite the page with original content?
If the issue happens randomly that will be difficult to track. Could you please activate WordPress revisions on your posts, that way we will be able to track changes and the author of those changes. That could help us identify the issue.
I did a quick search online and found that article: hidden link
Once you detect that the content of a page revert back, please share the URL with me and I will review the revisions for you.
We have checked the revisions on our site but we could not find the changes that we were looking for as you suggested.
We had set the revisions limit to 5 on our site so we could not identify exactly why the changes happened.
Sometimes, when people change one text here or there in other languages, it may have resulted in the page being reset, but we don't even know how or why that is happening.
For now, we have managed to re-import the page template from a previous backup of the site. We have also unlinked and re-linked all the pages on our site because of this. We have removed the revisions limit and we will monitor any changes on the pages and let you know.
There is another issue on our site now though, so instead of opening another support thread I want to ask it here.
ISSUE:
We have added some page headings/texts in the String translations settings in WPML.
For example on this page - hidden link
The Woocommerce My Account heading says "My Profile" on the Spanish page.
We have added string translations for the text in the settings page in WPML.
Screenshot for reference.
There are other such instances on our site where string translations are not working as they should even when we have added their translations.
Can you please check this and let us know how we can resolve this?
Thank you.
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