Customize the WPML Translation Editor - Advanced Editor, Classic Editor, and the WordPress Editor

How PTC itself behaves (when to auto-translate, what happens after, who’s allowed to trigger it, what PTC learns from your edits) lives on a separate page: Settings for WPML’s AI translation.

The Advanced Translation Editor

ATE is the editor that opens when you click Translate myself in the Dashboard or Translate on a task. It’s WPML’s default in WPML 5 and the recommended editor for new and existing sites.

What ATE gives you:

Side-by-side contextual translation. The source text on one side, your translation on the other, with the surrounding page context shown around them. You see what you’re translating – no guessing about placement.
Automatic translation in the same editor. Click a button and PTC (or whichever engine your site is configured with) translates the page. ATE shows the result alongside the source so you can review and edit inline. There’s no swap between “send for translation” and “review the result” – it’s the same window.
Safe HTML editing. ATE separates the text you can edit from the markup around it. You can’t accidentally break a link, strip a <strong>, or scramble nested tags. The editor protects the HTML structure regardless of how careful the translator is.
Glossary support. When you add a term to your glossary, ATE applies it automatically as you translate. Cross-link: The glossary.
SEO meta fields labelled inline. When the WPML SEO add-on is active, each Yoast SEO or Rank Math meta field (title, description, social tags, breadcrumb label) appears as its own row in ATE, clearly labelled, alongside the post body. Translators see and edit them in place. Cross-link: How to translate your site for multilingual SEO.
Translation memory. ATE recognizes segments you’ve translated before and offers them again, so consistent phrases stay consistent across the site.
Spell checker. Built in.
Front-end review. Preview the translated page exactly as visitors will see it before you publish.
The free monthly translation quota. WPML’s free monthly translation words are counted only when you use ATE.

For a typical site, ATE is what every translator uses for every job. It’s where the bulk of WPML’s recent engineering investment has gone, and where the WPML 5 features (PTC integration, edit-preservation, the Improve Translations tab) plug in. For the broader picture of how content moves through the editor from the Translations Dashboard, see the Translating content section.

When You’d Write Completely Different Content per Language

Some sites don’t want translations – they want different content per language. A French marketing landing that isn’t a translation of the English version. A locale-specific product page with copy written from scratch for that market. A news post that’s published in only one language.

That’s not ATE’s job. ATE translates a source post into another language; it assumes the translation should match the source’s structure and meaning. For genuinely different content, you use the WordPress editor itself:

Open the source post (or any post) in the standard WordPress editor.
In the Languages box on the right-hand side, click the + icon next to the language you want to add.
WPML creates a new post in that language and opens the regular WordPress editor for it. Write whatever content you want – independently of the source.
To edit an existing different-content translation, click the pencil icon for the language in the Languages box on the source’s edit screen.

The translations created this way are still linked to the source for navigation and language-switcher purposes (clicking the switcher takes visitors between them), but the content itself is unrelated. WPML doesn’t try to sync changes between them.

This route exists alongside ATE: ATE for translations that should mirror the source, the WordPress editor for content that should differ per language. Use whichever fits the post.

The Classic Translation Editor

The Classic Translation Editor (CTE) is WPML’s previous-generation editor. The Settings page labels it LEGACY for a reason: ATE has the features, CTE doesn’t.

CTE exists as a support-directed fallback. If WPML Support directs you to use CTE for a specific post (usually to bypass a temporary compatibility issue with a theme or plugin that’s misbehaving with ATE), that’s the situation it’s there for. The cases are rare and narrow, and any client moved to CTE should expect to move back to ATE once the underlying compatibility issue is resolved.

Don’t pick CTE as a parallel option to ATE. It doesn’t support automatic translation, glossary, translation memory, spell checker, or safe HTML editing. The free monthly translation quota isn’t available there. New sites should never start in CTE.

Where the Editor Settings Live

WPML > Settings > Translation Editor.

The Editor choice card lets you pick between Advanced and Classic at the site level, with a per-user override that translators can use if their personal preference differs from the site’s. A Use also for old translations created with the Classic Editor checkbox lets you migrate existing Classic translations into ATE so you can keep working in one editor.

Apply Formatting Markers in Translation Editor

ATE has tools for inserting formatting markers (bold, italic, code, emphasis) into a translation when the source uses them. The markers come from the source’s HTML. ATE shows them as protected anchors you place in the translation, and the rendered output preserves the source’s formatting in the target language. Use them whenever the source uses inline formatting that should appear in the translation.

Translate HTML Attributes

HTML attributes that are visible to humans (alt text on images, title text on links, aria-label text for accessibility) appear in ATE as separate translatable fields alongside the main content. You translate them the same way you translate body text. WPML detects these attributes automatically; you don’t have to configure each one.

Translate Links

When a link in the source content points to a page that has its own translation, ATE can swap the link to point to the translated target. Inside the editor, find the link’s segment and update the URL field to point to the translated destination. For consistent treatment across the site (the same source URL always points to the same target-language URL), accept a Link translation suggestion the next time PTC offers one – see How PTC learns your brand voice and translates like you do. PTC then applies the same swap everywhere the source URL appears.