Choose a language and understand scope
Language selection and operation scope are separate concerns in the Translation Manager.
Choose a language for editing
Open Translations, select Translate contents or Other translations, and choose an additional language from the language navigation. The table, search, status filter, edits, and bulk actions then apply to that locale.
In Translate contents, you can narrow the table by:
- search text;
- translation status;
- object type: post, term, or navigation menu;
- object ID;
- taxonomy when filtering terms.
These controls help editors review a focused set of rows. They do not configure a future generator run.
Understand the generator scope
Generate pending translations has no language, post-type, taxonomy, object, or status selector. It always targets every configured additional language, but it provides two processing modes.
Process all:
- enumerates every enabled post type;
- loads its posts in pages;
- loads all navigation menu items;
- enumerates every enabled taxonomy and all its terms;
- reparses each discovered object;
- searches the stored string table for unresolved entries in every additional language.
The final stored-string sweep also includes entries that object discovery cannot find, such as registered defaults and older pending rows.
Translate pending only performs only the final stored-string sweep. It does not enumerate or reparse posts, menu items, or terms, so it is the faster choice when source strings have already been generated.
Reduce unintended work
Configure supported content types and taxonomies before starting. Use Translation exclusions only for content that genuinely must be unavailable in a target language; it is not a temporary batch-size control.
For a limited quality check, work with filtered rows and their individual machine-translation controls instead of launching the site-wide generator. See Run a safe first sample.