HOW TO LOCALIZE WORDPRESS THEME?
Once there was a time when WordPress had been just a blogging platform; no one knew that it would prosper so rapidly. But with the continuous growth of the WordPress, it is clear that its attraction will go much, far beyond the original borders and international websites will also rely on WordPress for content delivery. The number of interested people who are developing their website in some language other than English has grown widely. No matter what is your region around the globe, but it’s really nice to have such websites where you can share your knowledge and thoughts. How would you go for WordPress front end translation into another language? The answer is surprisingly easy because it has been ensured that all the themes offer you a correct and an accurate translation solution. If you are a website developer and don’t know how to localize WordPress theme, then you might get necessary information here.
All kinds of translations take some particular time duration and need labor to get sorted. In case of theme translation the first and foremost step is “.pot file”. What is a .pot file? The .pot is an important language file which is in the format that is used by main CMS as well as applications that store the strings of the item; like a widget, theme, or a plugin. If you have already installed Quickstart package to have an entire set, then you can get .pot file through FTP. All you need is just to connect to the server and follow the path: /wp-content. Basically, All the WordPress themes include file which is located in the language folder of the theme accessible by just extracting the theme package.
Now you have all the required files, but you cannot change the core file if you want to show front end text in another language. In this case, you will need to make two different language files; .po and .mo as core files. “.po” will be treated as a base file from which translation is derived; it means that it is unalterable from a native language without throwing issues. You can create the files with a basic text editor, but in some cases you need to adjust some settings for correct encoding, and for the finest results, it is strongly suggested to use some dedicated tool, i.e. Poedit etc
Many people are used to work with WordPress editors or in HTML. For such people, there are several areas for creating translations. Firstly, localization should make use of UTF-8 encoding. While doing translations, try to write the translations clearly. This means that you should avoid escaping special and accented characters with HTML entities, save for a group which is expected to avoid the conflict with XHTML. When you aim at creating multilingual websites, keep in mind that translation is not everything you want; localization is much more significant than simply translating words and converting the website into another language. There are some words that do not mean the same thing in many languages, so try to avoid literary translations. Now you have a ready WordPress theme. Just use diverse translation tools to convert a simple WordPress website into a multilingual website. If you want to add more translations, you require a third party or translation plugin from any developer of the theme. The plugin made directly by a developer has an advantage that it gives regular updates and compatibility guarantee. There are several translation plugins that enable the accumulation of other translated content without getting into .po files. Translators and translation programs mostly use these files. You just need to access FTP and upload these files to the exact location and folder.
On the other hand, machine translation is not as accurate as human translations. It is not recommended for difficult languages like Japanese or Chinese. Having correctly translated websites are the key to success. But there is also a drawback of the lengthy and expensive translation process in case of human translation. Which one is good, the choice is ultimately yours.
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