JTrans Pro - Troubleshooting Guide

There are variations in the way servers are configured. As JTrans Pro uses CURL module of PHP to rewrite translated page URLs, CURL should be installed on your server. It is by default installed in more than 99% of all servers.

Important: If you are using JTrans Pro with Joomla! 1.0.13, please make sure you have installed the hotfix for that version of Joomla! as posted here at the official Joomla forum. You need to login there before you can see the attachment in RobS's post.

To reduce the incidence of translation related errors, please increase the cache time in the component configuration. We recommend 86400 seconds (24 hours) to avoid frequent requests to translation engines. You can set it even higher to further reduce the load on translation engines.

Here are some issues that may arise and solutions: 

• 404 Not Found error 

This is an indication that htaccess is not configured correctly. Possibilities include

1. no htaccess file at all
2. htaccess.txt not renamed to .htaccess
3. extra spaces in the codes or missing characters in codes
4. commented out JTrans Pro code

• 500 Internal Server Error

If you get this error, it is very likely that your PHP is running as CGI (phpSuExec installed in your server). When phpSuExec is installed, php scripts should be CHMODed to 644 and folders to 755 (this is a security feature). But, if your Joomla! has CHMODed the JTrans Pro files and folders to 666/777 on installation, you will get this error.

How to identify if you are running PHP as CGI?

Go to Joomla Admin > Top Menu > System > System Info > PHP Info

If Server API has CGI written in front of it, then you are running PHP as CGI. If so, then you need to change permissions (CHMOD) of folders to 755 and .php files to 644, especially here:
/components/com_jtranspro to 755
all .php files in that folder to 644

• 504 Server Error

These 504 errors have nothing to do with JTrans Pro per se. The problem is likely due to too many people using the translation at the same time, resulting in long queue for translation, thereby resulting in Gateway timeouts. These errors will go away by themselves in a short time.

• Translated pages are blank

Clear the cache and please check again. If it is still blank, then toggle the comment in line  # Options FollowSymLinks and check. It should work now.

• Blank page with "1" in that page. 

Clear the cache and please check again. If it is still blank, then toggle the comment in line  # Options FollowSymLinks and check. If you are using Joomla 1.0.13, make sure you have the hotfix installed from the link given at the top of this page.

• Clicking on translation flags returns to homepage, without translation

This error is the same as 404 Not Found Error above.  Probably your site is configured to return to homepage when 404 errors are encountered.
 

In addition, all the above errors may be produced because of the  # Options FollowSymLinks line. You may toggle (remove/add) the comment (#) and check.

• Flags are not clickable after translation

This is a known issue with Arabic translation only. It is possibly related to Google translation itself and there is no fix at this moment. As soon as it is available, we will let you know.

If you have this error with any other language, try clearing your cache as above and check again. It should resolve the issue.

• Japanese, Chinese and Koren languages appear as question marks, squares and other strange characters!

This is not because of an error in the components or Joomla! It is simply because you have not installed Asian language characters in your PC. Please refer to the Google Search results , till we add our own page on it.

• Call to undefined function curl_init() in...
  

• Images  disappear from the translated pages!
  

This may happen if the images are not referenced correctly from your site. Instead of placing images as "images/image.png" please place them as "/images/image.png" and it will work.

• JTrans Pro flags disappear suddenly sometimes.
  

This was due to a temporary issue at our admin area. If you notice this, please open a support ticket at http://support.joomlaspan.com with your license code in question and we will fix it for you as soon as possible.

• Strange characters are seen in translated pages.
  

Avoid Strange Characters in JTrans Pro Translated pages

Most Joomla! sites will render the non-English characters correctly. However, some Joomla installations need some tweaking to allow this. This issue especially applies with translations to French, Greek, Russian, Japanese, Chinese and Arabic languages.

If this is happening ONLY for Asian languages and only on your PC, the problem is with your PC. It cannot handle these fonts. Please install the Asian fonts. If all the above languages are affected and this is consistent on many PC terminals or is also seen on Windows Vista (which has Asian fonts installed by default), please read on.

To make your Joomla files UTF-8 compliant, please follow these instructions (we assume your database is already compliant. If not, look at the bottom box.):

Please make backups of all 3 files mentioned below!

STEP 1. Open the file globals.php and at the end of it, right after the last

}

and right before

?>

put the following code:

header("Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8");

STEP 2. Open the file language/english.php and go on line 421. Change the following code from:

DEFINE('_ISO','charset=iso-8859-1');

to:

DEFINE('_ISO','charset=UTF-8');

STEP 3. Open the file includes/database.php and change the following code from:

//        ("SET NAMES 'utf8'", $this->_resource);

        ("SET NAMES 'utf8'", $this->_resource);

THE END.

Now, save all the files and check the translations, they should be working fine.  

How to make your database also UTF-8 compliant?
If you are creating a new site, create your database manually and go to operations, and there set the collation of the database as utf8_general_ci. However, if you have already installed Joomla, this is quite complicated and you may request our technical staff for assistance.

• More will be added in time, if necessary...

If you have any new errors or if the above solutions do not work for you, please do contact us through the contact form above and we will assist you. However, if you need us to do the troubleshooting with or without complete installation and configuration by ourselves on your site, please get the JTrans Pro support package from the store. We will need temporary access to your Joomla! admin and FTP/ cPanel.