Pi in the Sky

Localization of WordPress themes

Posted on August 5th, 2007 at 4:28pm by Pi.
Categories: Development, WordPress.

Having a WordPress theme in your own language is quite easy, if the theme supports internationalization. Actually, internationalization, or i18n, is not the same as localization, or l10n. Internationalization is the process to make a piece of software ready to support localization. Localization itself is the process to translate a piece of software (which has passed i18n) to a specific language or locale.

To provide i18n in a theme, you need to know a little bit of PHP (but not too much), so I’ll skip that part. Once a theme has i18n, you just need to go to its page and get the theme. Often the theme is packed with a POT file (a translation template file), other times the POT is available in the same page, along with the already translated languages.

One of the themes with internationalization is Vistered Little, the theme I’m using in this site. It has passed thru i18n recently, and it is localized in at least two languages. You can download it freely (although Tom keeps a tip jar there, if you want) and the POT file will come with it.

Then you need a localization editor, more specifically, a gettext catalog editor. Gettext is the method used by WordPress to include internationalization and localization. There are several gettext catalog editors, but I use poEdit, which is freeware, cross-platform, and has been already localized in several dozen languages.

Once you’ve installed poEdit, you need to create a new catalog. You don’t really need to provide specific info such as paths for now; just ignore the errors that poEdit will give when creating a new catalog without paths. The only important thing for now is naming the catalog properly. The extension is .po, and the name should be the locale or language code you’re gonna use for this localization. The language code is made up of two different ISO two-letter codes, first one for the language, second one for the country or region. For example, spanish from Spain would be “es_ES”, while european french french would be “fr_FR” or something. Look into your WordPress configuration file (wp-config.php) to check which language you’re using, or check the ISO 639 two-letter language codes and ISO 3166 country and region codes. Certain language codes for WordPress just need to use the two-letter language code, without the region. You can read more about locales.

Then load the POT template file, which is done in “edit”, “update from a POT file”. poEdit will then show a long list of sentences in the original theme language (in VL’s case, english). When you click in one of them, the two boxes at the bottom will be filled. The top one contains the original sentence, while the bottom one will contain your translation.

Translating a theme with so much text as VL might take you 10-15 minutes, or maybe 30 minutes if you’re not really fluent in english or familiar with technical translations. Themes with less text can be done in a matter of maybe five minutes.

Once you’ve translated everything, you need to do something else other than saving the catalog (a .po file). You also need to compile it. Compilation generates a .mo file, which is the file that WordPress and the theme will actually use. It contains the strings, sentences, words, etc. in a specific way to make them accessible in a faster way from within the program.

Now place the .mo file (the compiled gettext catalog) into the corresponding folder; for some themes, it is the root folder of the theme, where for other themes, it is a specific folder within it called “l10n”, “translations”, or whatever. Be sure to navigate your WordPress blog as much as you can, to check that everything has been translated correctly. If you find something not correctly translated, reopen the .po file and edit. If you can’t find a specific untranslated sentence in the .po file, then it’s probably that the internationalization missed something. Contact the theme author with details on which text is not internationalized and where and how to find it while browsing a WordPress blog.

And that’s pretty much all, good luck with your translation, and be sure to contact the theme author with your new localization so others can use it.

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