The WPML Translation Dashboard – Send Content for Translation and Watch Progress

Translate Everything Automatically, or Translate Some

The Dashboard supports two modes. Under Translate Everything Automatically with PTC, WPML translates your site in the background. You don’t choose what to send, it just happens. Under Translate Some: You Choose What to Translate, you pick content yourself before anything goes out. The toggle at the top of the Dashboard switches between them. You can swap modes at any time without losing prior translations.

Two Layers of Filtering

On a site with thousands of entries, filtering is what makes the Dashboard usable. The Dashboard gives you two layers and they stack.

The global filter at the top of the page narrows everything that follows: source language, target language, publication status, translation status, and a keyword search. Set it to “show only French translations that need updating” and every section below collapses to that view.

Inside each section (Posts, Pages, and every other content type registered on the site), a per-section filter narrows further. Posts adds taxonomy-term filtering; Pages adds parent filtering. Stacked, the two layers get you from “10,000 posts” to “the 12 posts in the Marketing category whose Spanish translation is out of date” in a few clicks.

Every translatable post type appears in the Dashboard automatically: Posts, Pages, and every custom post type you’ve set translatable at Settings > Post Types Translation. Site Patterns, Content Templates, FAQs, plugin-registered CPTs, theme-registered CPTs – they all land here. There’s no per-CPT setup beyond that one switch.

What You Pay For

The Dashboard shows the word count for each row before you commit to translating it. Under Translate Everything Automatically with PTC, that’s what you pay for the first translation of a page into a language; edits afterwards are free until the page grows beyond that count. Under Translate Some, or on a legacy engine, you pay every time you send.

The Six Translation Methods

When you send content for translation, you pick one of six methods:

• Translate Automatically. Uses the AI engine your site is configured with. PTC is the default in WPML 5; DeepL, Google, and Microsoft remain selectable as legacy engines. The engine is a site-level setting. Change it at Settings > AI Translation, not per send. (The Dashboard shows a link to that setting so you can change it inline, but the change applies going forward.)
• Translate myself. Opens the entry in the Advanced Translation Editor.
• Assign a translator. Sends it to a translator you’ve added under Settings > Translators.
• Assign a translation service. Sends it to a connected professional translation service.
• Duplicate. Copies the source content into the target language slot, untranslated. For when you want to publish quickly and translate later.
• Do nothing. Keeps the row out of any translation flow.

The SEO meta fields each post carries (Yoast SEO, Rank Math, or All in One SEO titles, descriptions, social tags, and breadcrumb labels) travel with the post through whichever method you pick. See How to translate your site for multilingual SEO for the SEO-specific walkthrough.