?? TRANSLATEPRESS INCORRECTLY TRANSLATES SENTENCES WITH BOLD TEXT OR LINKS ?

  • THE HISTORY:

    This problem has been unresolved for almost 5 years…

    The PROBLEM – Short version:

    Translatepress translates “strings”, we know. but…. In machine translation, string selection separately translates “minor” or “decorative” html tags like <strong>, <a>, <b>, etc. instead of considering “block” or “phrase” tags like <div> or <p>.

    The PROBLEM – Detailed version with example of the disaster

    So, this how TranslatePress “translates” (or tries to) the following sentence:

    "Buy a pink elephant on this web page."

    First: it separate sentence and translate them separately:

    1. Buy
    2. a pink (bold)
    3. elefant on this
    4. web page (link)

    Second: put it all together and hope it makes sense!

    In Spanish, as expected, disaster struck:

    "Comprar a rosa elefante en este página web."

    This is 4 spelling mistakes and a serious grammatical one (in a sentence of 8 words!)

    (Something like translating “I am Tarzan and you are Jane” into “Me Tarzan, you Jane”.)

    How BIG is the problem?

    This is a problem that completely affects the translation, which is the main purpose of the plugin, so I think it should be considered VERY SERIOUS and URGENT.

    The Translatepress’ responses:

    …sometimes may cause deviation from the original sentence structure when HTML tags such as bold and links are present within the text.

    But the problem is not “sometimes”, nor is it a “deviation”, it happens “ALWAYS”, and the result is an INCORRECT, NOT VALID AND MEANINGLESS TRANSLATION.

    One approach would be to wrap the page’s content with a translation block:
    https://translatepress.com/docs/translation-editor/#translation-blocks

    We tried adding the “translation-block” class to the paragraphs, and it seems to work well. But?how do we apply that to hundreds of pages and thousands of paragraphs with bolds or italics or links…?

    The possible SOLUTION:

    We understand the Translatepress translate by strings, but…

    …Could the option be added for automatic translation to omit, in the selection of strings, the “minor” or “decorative” tags like?<strong> <a> <b>?etc. and only consider “block” or “sentence” tags like <div> or <p>?

    In fact, you already have as an option to avoid it manually with the class “translation-block”, right?
    So it would be more accurate to configure Translatepress so that the usual behavior is to treat sentences as blocks (without separating bold words and links), and if someone wants (for some unknown reason) that the bold words or links are translated as isolated strings, then those people should activate it with the class “no-translation-block”.

    HOPE IT HELPS..

    But as @birtakimseyler said:

    there are aspects of TranslatePress that I like. However, this situation always drives me to want to get rid of the product at the first opportunity. The moment I find something better, I will say goodbye to it.

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  • Plugin Support Anca

    (@ancavictoria)

    Hello,

    We apologize for the inconvenience caused.

    Unfortunately, at the moment, we do not have a solution for this issue.

    Bold words have a different HTML tag and are detected separately, so the only solution is to use the translation block where you will need to manually add the correct links for each language.

    We will get back to you with information as soon as we have a solution for this issue.

    Thank you for your understanding!

    Kind regards,

    Anca

    It would seem quite trivial to detect the enclosing tag, be it a P or a DIV. This really must be fixed!

Viewing 2 replies - 1 through 2 (of 2 total)
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