Background of the issue:
I'm working on a website where the default language is set to Latvian, and there are two more languages installed. All the content is in Lithuanian, and I expected to use the Automatic translation tool to translate this content to Latvian and English. I was assured that automatic translation could be used before I purchased WPML.
Symptoms:
The Automatic translation tool does not translate from any other language other than English.
Questions:
Is it safe to switch the default language after disabling automatic translation for it?
How can I use the Automatic translation tool to translate from Lithuanian to Latvian and English?
You should be able to translate from Lithuanian to Latvian and English. You can see the language pairs the automatic translation engines WPML uses can translate here: hidden link.
By default, changing the default language shouldn't be a problem, and it would mainly change the way the domains are shown in the front-end (if site.com was English first, now it will show the German content, and site.com/en will show the English version).
Beware, of course, that doing this means that if you had sites crawled with a specific URL, you will want to re-crawl them on your search console by just resending the sitemap.
Then, just to be sure, you can also do the following:
Go to WPML -> Support -> Troubleshooting and press the following buttons:
• "Clear the cache in WPML"
• "Remove ghost entries from the translation tables"
• "Fix element_type collation"
• "Set language information"
• "Fix post type assignment for translations"
That should be all.
NOTE:
As a precaution, please take a backup from BEFORE you make this change and one afterwards, so that you can have "checkpoints" you can return to. Even better, you can try this on a staging site first and check if anything unusual occurs afterwards.
**** Important! Please make a full site backup (files and DB) before you proceed with those steps****
Please let me know if you have any further questions.
