Using Poedit to Translate PublishPress Plugins
As started to get more and more requests for translations of PublishPress plugins.
As a team, we speak English, Spanish, Bulgarian, Croatian, Russian and Brazilian Portuguese.
That's a pretty good list, but it only goes so far. What about French, German and the other popular languages that our users want? No matter how big we grow, we'll never be able to cover every language, so we need to allow PublishPress users to translate our plugins.
There are several ways for users to translate plugins. In this guide, we'll recommend an excellent tool called Poedit.
Translating a plugin with Poedit
Here's an introduction to how Poedit works.
- Start with a copy of your plugin files. For this translation example, I'm going to use PublishPress Capabilities Free. Click here to download the latest version.
- Download Poedit from poedit.net. They offer Mac, Windows and Linux versions.
- Run the Poedit installer on your desktop.
- Click “Create new….
- Select the existing .pot files from your plugin's /languages/ folder.
- Choose the language for your translation. In this example, I'm choosing German.
- On the left-hand side, you will see a list of all the English translations. On the right-hand side there’s a blank column with spaces waiting for your translation:
- At the bottom of the screen, you can enter your translation text into the “Translation” field:
- So far so good, but this next feature is why Poedit really stood out for us. It has automatic suggestions, based on what other users have chosen. In this example, it suggests “Erlauben Sie bestimmten Benutzerrollen oder Benutzern, jeden Beitrag zu verwalten.” as the translation for “Allow specific user roles or users to manage each post.”. You get 10 free suggestions. If you pay $20, you get unlimited suggestions.
- Once you've completed translating all the strings, you can export your file.
- Poedit will export both a .po and an .mo file. You will need both of those files.
- Place these in your /languages/ folder using the naming structure you can see below. You can find a list of locale identifiers here.
- If your WordPress site is running your language (in this case, German), your plugin will automatically detect your new files and display in your language:
Hopefully this is a helpful guide to get started with translating WordPress.
Using Poedit on other plugins and themes
This guide is applicable to PublishPress plugins, and it is possible to use Poedit to translate many other plugins and themes. However, if you want to use it as a more general guide to translating WordPress, it's worth checking to make sure your plugin or theme really can be translated. These tutorials will help you: