Background of the issue:
I am trying to use automatic translation on my website. I purchased 250k credits for translating German language content, expecting them to be sufficient.
Symptoms:
The translation engine consumed over 320k+ credits, exceeding the original estimation of 230k credits. Many products remain untranslated or mistranslated, such as 'Herringbone parquet' being mistranslated as 'Fishtail parquet'. Menu and string translations are not working as expected, and there are pending translations in the queue.
Questions:
Why has the translation engine consumed more credits than estimated?
How can I resolve the mistranslations and untranslated products?
Why are menu and string translations not working as expected?
How can I clear the pending translations in the queue?
Refund for the excessive credit usage!
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Thank you for your patience and apologies for the delay, I am still checking for the said issue. I also need to consult with my team. Please allow me some more time and I'll get back to tomorrow with more information.
Basically the issue messed up our entire site. We need to restore site from before auto translation all the 391+ eur credit was useless and broke our site completely.
We have spent hours of debugging issue. We expect a full refund and solution for future!
Thank you for the updates, your patience and cooperation.
After a detailed discussion with my team, we need more information about what exactly was messed up due to this issue (i.e. consuming credits more than estimated)?
As long as the overuse is concerned, please note that the counter we have is approximate (that's why it is an estimate) and there are fields that are not counted because they are added later (image titles, image descriptions, acf/yoast fields, etc). We're trying to improve this estimate in a next major release and hopefully that 'll be more accurate.
So if you can explain that how consuming credits messed up the translations or site, we'll be able to see if we can consider for a partial refund. We pay for those credits in advance, that's the reason why we can't refund them if things work correctly. We're willing to refund partially but only if we find any actual errors or bugs, after you provide more details.
For other things you mentioned when reporting this ticket, please consider following:
- Many products remain untranslated: This may be due to insufficient credits. But if there were sufficient credits and still content remained untranslated, can you please provide links to the pages or content or more detailed information (i.e. is there any issue you see in ATE Error Logs in WPML -> Support)?
- or mistranslated: Please explain and provide more details about what was mistranslated? Although you mentioned about one word "such as 'Herringbone parquet' being mistranslated as 'Fishtail parquet'.", this depends on the translation engine that how it deals with the language. As I quickly searched in Google and both refer to the same thing. But of course such terms can be industry specific. You can use WPML Glossary Feature to deal with such industry-standard terms or acronyms.
- there are pending translations in the queue: Again, this could be due to insufficient credits.
In short, to investigate issue further, we need more details including links to the pages and content where it was messed (and what was messed).
P.S.: I tried to look again into your site today but unfortunately I'm not able to login anymore. If you agree to provide the access, please let me know. I'll enable your next reply as private for this purpose.
Still waiting for my refund. You did not solve the issue we restored site from backup as the Ai feature destroyed our site and translations where completely wrong.
Languages: English (English )Spanish (Español )Italian (Italiano )
Timezone: Europe/Rome (GMT+01:00)
Hello!
I was assigned this ticket since I'm an Advanced Translation Editor Specialist.
I wanted to let you know that the sole reason why you haven't had your refund back is because we need some info so we can actually have a good outcome on it!
You are using quite serious words like the translations "destroyed your site", but you're not telling us how.
I really want to move forward with this and actually get the refund for you (A full refund, I mean) but we can't do that unless we have details on what happened so we can then obtain the refund from the correct team.
Rest assure that you WILL get a refund, I'm going to make sure of hat and all am asking is to answer the questions that my colleague asked you so we can give you the full refund 🙂
- Many products remain untranslated: "1000+ products "
- or mistranslated: "exactly Deel mistranslated and used wrong wordings that where not industry specific, like it was 10 years ago Google Translate, ChatGPT or Gemini never makes these mistakes. "
- there are pending translations in the queue: Again, this could be due to insufficient credits. - "This is not accurate as it showed how many was in the queue and thin I bought that many credit and after it uses all credit it said i need to buy again same amount of credit and again and again like in a repeat mode for many times and no results. "
Languages: English (English )Spanish (Español )Italian (Italiano )
Timezone: Europe/Rome (GMT+01:00)
Hello!
So when you mean that it destroyed your site, you mean that it's not using correct wording? It's not really creating LAYOUT issues or crashing your site, right?
I'm not judging or anything, I'm just trying to understand better the situation here :).
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We currently refunded The only invoice you have with Pay-As-You-Go, of roughly 66 euros. This is an exception because while we are trying to improve exactly this aspect of machine translation (Which is pretty much the reason that a lot of people avoid it), we can't be responsible for the quality that a certain translation engine offers.
We usually suggest that you translate just a few pages first, not the entire site, exactly to avoid this (that's also why we gift you credits when you first buy the plugin).
Since the other credits were prepaid credits, The refund will be on another team. I will send the ticket to a colleague that will proceed with those refunds as well.
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We are working on using AI alongside a few techniques with how the content is segmented exactly to improve this part of the translations (trying to find and better understand the context and help the translation engines understand it better as well). You already have a few previews of this with WPML AI engine but I'd actually suggest you wait until WPML 4.7 which will come with extra tools to greatly improve this part of the translations, before testing it. I'm sure it will help your situation.
It retranslated most of existing content and messed up layouts as well. Additional missing translations it used incorrect wordings.
So when you mean that it destroyed your site, you mean that it's not using correct.
Pay as you go we used only for manual carefully selected ai translations and even that used wrong wordings.
After that testing we enabled full auto translation and that messed everything up and did not translate even the amount it calculated so based on support proposal we added more credits but it never stopped looked like it did rewritings 3-4 times and did not translate only missing parts, and even the translations it did messed up layouts and used totally wrong wordings.
