AEM Sites Developer Expert: Translation Project Overwrites Author Edits on a Live Language Copy

Translation Project Overwrites Author Edits on a Live Language Copy

A brand runs /content/brand/us (English) and language copies fr, de, and jp. The fr copy is live and has been hand-edited by the French team for legal reasons. A new translation project is launched to update de and jp from us. The project is configured with the default translation workflow and includes the fr path because a content-package filter was copied from an earlier project. After the project runs, the French team reports their legal edits were replaced with machine-translated English. The us source has roughly 1,200 pages; the project targeted 1,500 including fr.

1. Explain the mechanism by which the French edits were overwritten and how the filter scope caused it.

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AEM translation projects operate on the paths listed in the project's translation scope (the filter/target paths). The project's scope included the fr path-copied from an earlier project's filter-so the workflow treated fr as a target to be updated from the us source. When the translation job ran, it pulled source content from us, translated it, and wrote the results into the fr language copy, overwriting the hand-edited nodes. The legal edits were not protected because they live on the same nodes the workflow writes to, and the default workflow does not distinguish author-edited target content from machine-translated content.

The 1,500 vs. 1,200 count is the tell: the project targeted 300 more pages than the source has, which is exactly the extra fr scope. The fix is scoping, not translation quality.

2. What safeguards would you put in place to prevent recurrence, and how would you recover the French content?

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Prevention:

Scope projects explicitly and review the target path list before launch; never copy a filter wholesale. Add a launch checklist that diffs target paths against the intended language copies.
Exclude live, hand-edited language copies from automated translation scope, or use a workflow that only updates nodes flagged as machine-translated and skips nodes with an author-edit marker.
Use versioning: ensure language copy nodes are versioned before a translation run so rollback is possible. AEM's version manager can restore prior versions if enabled.

Recovery:

Restore the fr nodes from version history (if versioning was active) or from the most recent package backup taken before the run. If neither exists, the legal team must re-apply edits-this is why the pre-run backup step belongs in the checklist.
After recovery, re-run only de and jp with a corrected scope and verify the target path list in the project before execution.