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Tutorials for Translating WordPress Themes

Zack — Wed, 03 Feb 2010 03:18:14 +0000

I was thinking about translating my themes to other languages, so that I started to search for some information. And I found it’s not that easy as I imagined. Some details need to be concerned.

I thought maybe I can write a tutorial for this, but later I decided it’s not necessary to reinvent the wheel. Here I will introduce you for some great tutorials on WordPress Themes Translation, wish may help you.

http://codex.wordpress.org/Translating_WordPress
Official translating tutorial from WordPress.org codex, most of the concepts you need to know was introduced. But this is not just for translating themes, but about the whole WordPress translating. If you are new to this topic, this should be your first post.
Localizing WordPress Themes & Plugins
This is a great and detailed tutorial on how to make your themes and plugins translatable.
Translating WordPress Plugins & Themes
From the same author as the second tut, while the above one is about making your themes and plugins translatable, this tut is talking about translating themes and plugins in practice with poEdit and GNU Gettext.
Make Your WordPress Theme Ready For Translation
This is a tutorial I wrote before, as you can see in the title, it’s about making your theme translatable.
My Tutorials on Translating WordPress Theme (Chinese)
As there are not enough Chinese tutorials on translating WrodPress themes, I translated and wrote this series of translating tuts according to above 3 tuts.

If you have some information that I missed or better than these tuts, feel free to let me know.

Make Your WordPress Theme Ready for Translation

Zack — Wed, 20 Jan 2010 14:13:49 +0000

If you want your WordPress themes to be used by more people, you can translate them to other languages, or ask your theme user to do this for you. But first of all, you need to make your theme texts translatable.

To do this, you need know how WordPress do the translation. WordPress uses GNU gettext for localization. With this framework, you can mark your theme texts for translation. You can use the following two ways to mark texts.

__($text) : this means $text need to be translated, and returns the result.
_e($text) : this means $text need to be translated, and prints out the result to the webpage, equal to echo __($text).

Let’s see some examples, the first one is the easiest one, when you have no posts to display, we will show a message: ‘Not Found’, here is the code:

Not Found

Because this message will directly print to the screen, we use _e():

This is very easy, isn’t it. The second example is about the comment number, here is the code:

The translations are not directly print out, but to be used for the function. So we are using __() to do this:

There is one more situation, which is you need to translate a sentence with parameter. Here is one example:

by

You can’t only translate ‘by’, because in some languages, you need translate the whole sentence so that it will make sense. Here is how to do it:

We use PHP function printf() to insert the_auther() to __(‘by %s’), so that you can translate the whole sentence.

Now you know how to make your theme translatable, next time I will write about how to translate your theme.