Have you ever faced an associated translation of a page disappearing in WPML? If you have faced this problem and have to this page for a solution then chances are that the solution presented here will help you just like it helped us.

Our scenario: We added Spanish translation to translation jobs under the “Translation Management” section of WPML plugin. Later on, we deleted the translation job and didn’t realize that this will cause the translation of a page to disappear in WPML later on.

Once started translating the pages using “WPML’s Classic Translation Editor” then the pages for the Spanish language started disappearing as soon as we would click on the Duplicate button.

After going through WPML settings numerous times and searching through Google for hours finally we found a clue to fix the problem. What happened is that when we deleted the translation from the translations jobs then WPML added some NULL values in the wp_icl_translations table.  The solution was to sort the “element_id” column in ascending order to get all the NULL values for the “element_id” column. Next was to select all the rows having NULL values for column “element_id” and delete them.

Try this solution carefully as you might get to other problems if you don’t know this much technical stuff. Luckily we were on wpengine hosting so first we created a staging site, applied the solution there and once we confirmed that the solution works then we applied it to live site as well.

Hope this solution helps some of you to fix the problem of associated translation of a page disappearing in WPML.