Translation issues with news articles, blog posts and publications

[StephenAbbott]

Following our recent publication of a news article in English, French and Spanish, we've identified a couple of small bugs with the translation process in our Wagtail build which I want to record:

1. When you create a translated version, links in Summary/highlight box fields aren't detected as links as part of the translation so you are unable to provide an alternative version of those links in another language. In the examples linked to above, we resolved this by moving the links into a rich text field and then carrying on as normal

2. Tables created using the Table box are also not detected as translatable text

3. On English versions of publication child pages like this one, we use the Details content block to create the Footnote and Endnotes fields. These show up on the English version, but not on the French version of that same page. Those fields don't show up on the public version of the page and the text in those fields also can't be translated using the Wagtail CMS functionality

4. For this Spanish translation of a publication, the Summary subheading in the description section seems to be hardcoded to the English word rather than being translatable

[StephenAbbott]

Following call with @drcongo, updating OO's Wagtail instance to version 3 or version 4 may fix this. Need to estimate the time it will take to do those updates

[drcongo]

I've got Wagtail 3 working in a branch and I don't think this is resolved by that upgrade, but still hopeful for Wagtail 4. However with v4 we're also waiting on some other packages to support it, in particular wagtail-localize which does most of the heavy lifting with translations.

[philgyford]

I'm not sure when the upgrade happened, but we're currently using Wagtail 4.2 (and there's now another issue to upgrade to Wagtail 5)… are these all still issues @StephenAbbott?

[StephenAbbott]

@philgyford These are all still live issues in Wagtail 4.2 but we've been using a work around where we simply stop syncing the translated files which then means the user can manually edit/update non-English language versions instead.

Should we leave this open for now to see if Wagtail 5 fixes any of these issues? Or close it?

[philgyford]

Let's leave it open if they're still issues.

[philgyford]

I've only had a tiny bit of time to have a look at this so far (on Wagtail 5.1):

1. When I translated a summary box containing a link, the link came through, but without any href attribute. It was: <a id="a1">. Is that what you're seeing @StephenAbbott ?
2. It looks like Tables aren't supported by wagtail-localise: TableBlock is not supported wagtail/wagtail-localize#302
3. Yes, looks like the DisclosureBlock (as the Details block is called in the code) isn't picked up for translation. Not sure why at this stage.
4. To clarify, you set the "Summary title" field in the English version like this:
   
   Then does it show up in the translated version of the page in Wagtail like this?
   
   And if you add a translation, the translation isn't used on the published page? (I can't check this at the moment because my dev site is throwing an error if I try to submit a translation!)

[StephenAbbott]

Thanks @philgyford. So it sounds like (1) has been fixed - and (2) and (3) still aren't possible in Wagtail. Worth a further dig into why DisclosureBlock may not be translatable at present?

On (4), you've found a clever workaround. If you don't fill in the Summary title block, it automatically shows the word Summary but that is then not brought through for translation. So we'll just need to make sure that we write Summary into the Summary title block so that it is made available for translation.