Trouble with Multilanguage news items

I am encountering the following (on version 5.3)

on the homepage, I have a News Item widget, to list the last 3 published news items.
The site is set up for english and chinese... chinese being the primary language.

the news items that appear are always the english version of them, even if the page is shown in chinese or english.

I believe that the issue started occurring when the translations sync was broken.

I have another site with everything same and working... the only difference I can think of is that the site showing the issue, the homepage "sync translations" option has been disabled.

Has anyone experienced this and is there a way to resolve it ?
(apart from building the page from scratch again and keep the translation sync enabled...)

Hi Ernesto,

 If you create a new test page with sync, does it work as you would expect?