[BUG][17.0] HTML Field translation makes multi-website/multi-lang impossible to manage

[helgvor-stoll]

Impacted versions: 17 (and older I think)

Steps to reproduce: Create one website per country. For example, domain.fr for France with French as default language, domain.de for Germany with German as default language, ...

Current behavior: Updating a description_ecommerce and/or website_description on a product form on domain.fr for example will overwrite every description_ecommerce/website_description of the same product in each other language. Updating a translation of these fields in a language will overwrite the content in other language and that makes ecommerce unusable in a mult-iwebsite/multi-lang context. It's the same for the field website_description in the table : model product_public_category (Category description)

Expected behavior: Even though these descriptions are accessibles from the website builder and then per website, these fields are not website dependant but only language dependant. So, modifying a product description in a language must not overwrite the description in other languages. I think there can we 2 way for resolving this:

• The first one, if we want to keep the same translation philosofy, is when modyfiing the content of a language, update the other languages by just by adding the new content and not updating the old one normally already transleted. But what if we delete a content in the translation?
• The second one can be separating text content and media contents. In this case, in the creation process we do it as before (duplicate content in each language). When modifying a content in a language, we don't update the other language contents. Why cutting the content in separate "terms" and not leaving them as a whole?
  The ideal way, why not, would be to have the possibility to update these kind of fields (not website dependant fields) directly from product/category from the backend but technically....

Video/Screenshot link (optional):

Support ticket number submitted via odoo.com/help (optional):

[rikmentink]

I'd love to see a fix for issue. We also have multiple websites, each with one language, and our product descriptions are different for each. The current html_translate option only allows us to translate the terms of each html element, which makes it impossible to use different html code for each language.

[vava-odoo]

@rdeodoo do you have any idea on how to fix this?

[rdeodoo]

I don't think there is something to fix.

It's far from ideal but it's how it behaves for now. When you write on an HTML field source term, it changes all the translations terms (except if the change is like a small % of the total words but let's ignore that). The ideal is that you changed the source term so you need to also change the translated terms to replicate what you changed in the source term.
It's not the case for text field, when you change the source term, translations remains.

So, modifying a product description in a language must not overwrite the description in other languages.

It's not the case except if you modify the main language, right?

This seems very related to what @qsm-odoo suggested to @HydrionBurst here #147358 (comment)
It was about having a better translation interface when you do those changes in the website builder (in the "frontend", not in the backend (form view)). It would really mitigate the issue you describe here.
I don't know if it went further than the current exchanges on the PR.

Also worth noting, there is currently a "delay translation" feature, which would prevent the "wipe" of the translations until you explicitly enter edit mode in the website builder in that translated language.
It was planed for Odoo 17 but got disabled, it will probably be back in Odoo 18. See 0e0a74f

[rdeodoo]

Note that I just found that this issue is related to task-3703033