Simple explanation, Client's portal requires an English and French version. We have some elements Color/Couleur and Breed/Race that are lookups to Color and Breed entities respectively. The lookups work if you select the link and set the fetchxml to capture the namefrench vs name field and leave it as updateable. But the widgets are for display only and as soon as you modify them to be readonly, the name field value is shown not the namefrench value. No other changes made, and can be reproduced by flipping the readonly option on and off. On, and namefrench is displayed, off and english name field is displayed.
Sitefinity version 14 and PC version 6.1.
FetchXML on widget.
<fetch version="1.0" mapping="logical" output-format="xml-platform">
<entity name="ckc_colour">
<attribute name="ckc_colourid" />
<attribute name="ckc_namefrench" />
<order attribute="ckc_namefrench" descending="false" />
</entity>
</fetch>
even with the same widget twice linked up exaclty the same, the readonly one shows the English value, and the updateable one shows the French Value.