Understand background machine translation

When background translation is enabled, saving eligible source content can add its unresolved strings to a scheduled machine-translation queue. WordPress cron processes that queue without requiring an editor to keep the Translation Manager open.

Frontend visitors never run this work. A request for a localized page reads stored translations only; any missing value falls back to its source text.

Enable or disable the queue

Open Settings → POM Translate → Advanced → LLM translation settings → Machine translation settings.

• Leave Disable background translation unchecked to queue eligible source changes.
• Check it to stop adding strings and stop scheduled queue processing.

Disabling the background workflow does not disable Translate with POM AI, software batch translation, or browser-driven pending translation. It also does not delete stored translations.

How scheduled work is bounded

One scheduled run reads at most 20 queued strings and sends at most one POM AI batch. If eligible work remains, POM Translate schedules another run about 60 seconds later. If an editor changes a source value while work is running, the older result is not allowed to replace that newer source.

Requests stay within the POM AI source limits:

• no more than 400 source words;
• a normal target of up to 320 source words;
• up to 25 strings for a post and its metadata;
• up to 50 strings for another compatible group;
• a hard service limit of 200 strings.

An individual source string over 400 words is not queued. It remains available for manual handling rather than causing a permanently failing scheduled job.

Monitor and control it

Open Translations → Generate pending translations.

The Machine Translation Status card shows:

• Strings in queue;
• Daily Word Quota;
• Strings Today;
• a warning when excessive errors have paused machine translation.

Process now drains the visible queue from the browser in bounded groups. Cancel scheduled translations clears the queue and its scheduled events, but leaves source rows and existing translations intact.

The page's Generate pending translations workflow is separate: it stores its own resumable server-side job and can continue through WordPress cron after the browser closes.

Reliable production processing

WordPress cron depends on site traffic unless the host invokes it from a real scheduler. POM Translate also runs an independent hourly watchdog: when it finds queued strings or a running generation job without a worker event, it schedules the missing worker after translation settings and licensing are available again. If the queue still does not move, confirm WordPress cron is enabled and being executed, then use Process now as a diagnostic.

Do not diagnose queue progress by repeatedly visiting public pages. Those visits may trigger WordPress cron scheduling, but they never call POM AI as part of rendering.