What happens if I change the original content of my website?

In this article, you'll find what happens if you change the original content of your website and how Weglot will handle those modifications.

It is possible that you may need to update the original content on your site from time to time to keep up with changes.

It's important to know that changing the original content on your website will have an influence on your Weglot translations as well.

1) How Weglot Works:

Here is exactly how Weglot works in the back end:

1. It scans the original content of your website
2. It generates a translation of the content in the translated language selected by the user
3. It stores these translations in your Translation List
4. It displays the translations on your website instead of the original content
5. The final product is the original content and the translated content matching together

2) Modification of the original content = new translation generated on Weglot

When Weglot translates your original content, it creates its equivalent in your selected language.

For example, your website has English as original language and French as translated language:

•  English (original version) sentence: "I have one apple"
•  French (translated version) sentence: "J'ai une pomme"

Then, you choose to change the original content of your website, for example:

From "I have one apple" to "I have two apples"

As "J'ai une pomme" isn't the translated version of "I have two apple", Weglot will consider "I have two apples" as a new string and will translate it to "J'ai deux pommes", which is the correct translation.

3. Consequences on your Translation List

Changing the original content of your website can also impact your Translation List.

As Weglot is creating new translations each time you change the original content of your website, the previous translations will also be found in your list but the new generated translation will take priority is showing on your site. 

Important:

If you have previously manually edited a translation and an edit has been done to the original content, you will not lose this manual translation but the new automatic translation generated by Weglot will display instead of the manual one as the content has changed. If you wish to keep the previous manual translation, you will be able to find it in your translations list, copy and paste it into the newly created translation.

These unused translations won't be automatically removed from your Translation List, so you'll have to remove them manually by yourself from there so that they won't be counted in your word count for nothing.

See these articles to check how to remove translations:

- How to definitely remove a translation?

- How can I remove inactive translations?