How to translate Travelify and Pinbin WordPress themes
There are over 6800 spoken languages worldwide and currently, our Travelify theme uses one – English is translated in English, French, German, Hungarian, Italian, Spanish, Dutch, Hebrew, Slovak, Turkish, Swedish, Brazilian Portuguese, Polish, Finnish and Chinese. However, this theme is built so that you can easily translate it. We have already added default “.pot” WordPress language files and you can start WordPress theme translation from there.
Please note! This tutorial will apply to most WordPress themes that are translation-ready and not just, Sparkling, Dazzling, Travelify or Pinbin so feel free to read further even if you are not using our themes.
Before you start (Important)
This guide can still be used to translate any WordPress theme, however, there is now an option to translate them directly using GlotPress. For more information on how to proceed, please read this guide.
How to translate WordPress Theme?
Please read a chapter above this before you proceed with the “old” method of translating themes.
1. First of all you will need to download .PO/.pot file editor like Poedit or other. It is possible to use any text editor but it will be so much easier to use Poedit than regular text edit so I strongly recommend downloading it. It’s free, works on Mac, Windows and Linux and there is no reason not to use it.
2. Second thing is to open default language files form your theme. In Travelify case it is located in languages folder inside theme folder. This file is called travelify.po. You should use this default file for translation but you need to create a new file when you are done. Most themes has the same structure and language files should be somewhere inside theme folder. There is chance that your theme is not ready for translation so it might take time to modify. If you are not developer it might be a pain to create translation support for theme.
3. Now in the Poedit click on original text one by one and write your translation underneath. Just like you can see iu the screenshot below. It will take some time to get through all of them so be patient. If you think that some translations you won’t need you can leave them as they are in the original language.
4. Now the most important part. When you are saving your file in theme language folder you should use proper language code. For instance if you have translated WordPress theme to German you should use “de_DE.po” as file name and “fr_FR.po” for French. This will make sure that WordPress understands what language you are referring to. For other languages codes please see this documentation.
Note:
Default language file extension is .pot (travelify.pot, sparkling.pot, dazzling.pot etc) but you have to use .po to make your translation work. Also Poedit application will create .mo and it needs to be included in languages folder as well.
5. Now WordPress will use theme language the same as your WordPress language. If your WordPress dashboard uses French, don’t expect for theme to show German. Changing WordPress language will automatically change theme language if it is available in the theme language folder under proper name we discussed in Step 4.
6. Changing WordPress language is as easy as adding
define ('WPLANG', 'fr_FR');
to the wp-config.php file located at your WordPress installation root folder. You can download WP language files or entire WordPress installation in your language from here.
Update: As of WordPress 6.0 you can now choose WordPress language when installing it. Afterwards you will get a new option under Settings – General where you can switch to any language. See screenshot below:
If you installed WordPress before WordPress 4.0 become available you will still have to define language via wp-config.php but afterward you will get a notification in your WordPress dashboard that it is no longer required to define language via configurations file but you have to initialize it once.
If you have translated Travelify, Pinbin or other our WordPress themes you can send me “.po” language files and I will add them to the default theme installation. I will feature your name on the theme itself as well as I will give credit on this website. I appreciate your support and will say a proper thank you! 🙂
If you have any questions regarding WordPress theme translation or any questions related to our WordPress themes please don’t hesitate and leave your questions in the comments below.
Update (1):
It would be appreciated if you could contribute to improving our themes! We have created a special page for our contributors!. We try to keep that page updated once more translations are available.
Update (2):
The guide is updated to include information about WordPress 4.0 which makes it easier to use WordPress in your language.
We hope you find out how to translate a WordPress theme and now can give back to the community by translating themes and plugins for others to use. We are giving away free WordPress themes and I hope you will do that with theme translations as well.
Update (3):
Now you can translate our WordPress themes directly on WordPress.org and your theme translation files will be automatically taken and used by sites that switch language. For translation just go to a particular theme such as Shapely and then to the section that says Translate Shapely on the right side of the theme descript You can find all our WordPress themes here.ion.
Related Posts
I have translated Dazzling 1.2 to Polish language. It seems, that it works fine 😉 How can I translate Dazzling popular posts plugin too?
Thank you for pointing this out! I see that these strings are missing from default translation files. I have already updated it and pushed to WordPress and Github.
https://github.com/puikinsh/Dazzling
https://wordpress.org/themes/dazzling/developers/
Soon proper translation file will be available via automated update as well.
Have you noticed that there are some other missing strings to translate?
I would really appreciate if you could send translation files as well, so I can add them to theme installation.
Thank you for your effort! I really appreciate it!
I am happy I can help. Translation files and my suggestions about missing strings should be in your mailbox 🙂
I have translated about 50 % of the language file to swedish but I can´t figure out why it doesn´t seem to work. The file is named sv-SE.po and wordpress is set to show swedish. Most of the the text in the backend is swedish. Any ideas about what´s wrong?
I can send you the translation I´ve done this far.
Which theme do you use?
Have you generated binary .mo file after translation? Maybe this is reason.
Poedit created a file with the ending .mo and this file is also uploade to my site, in the same folder as the translation.
I use the Travelify theme.
Hi! I want to use Dazzling theme with a bilingual page. I’m using mqTranslate and everything works fine besides the theme – it won’t show in Polish. I uploaded Polish translation into /dazzling/languages (both .pl and .mo files) and set define(‘WPLANG’, ‘pl_PL’); but the theme does not want to switch to Polish (all the other things (posts/titles/menus) with language tags work perfectly). Any hints why?
You didn’t need to upload anything to languages folder because translations was already there if you use the latest theme version and I am certain that this translation does work. There might be some missing strings but nothing major.
Make sure that your translations are exactly like these: https://github.com/puikinsh/Dazzling/tree/master/languages
I didn’t notice theme update ofc. Now everything works fine. Thank you. Great theme 🙂
Hi. I’ve been translating the pinbin theme into Finnish, and I’m using the Polylang plugin to translate the site I’m building. I’ve changed and added a few extra translatable strings into a child theme, but I can’t get the comments section to translate, nor have I found where to turn the strings translatable either. Basically, what I mean is that I can’t get strings like “[commenter] says”, “Logged in as”, or, for example, the post comment button to translate. Everything else is working great, but this bugs me. Any tips on how to achieve this?
Hi Sini 😀 I don’t know the plugin Polylang, but You can try https://wordpress.org/plugins/codestyling-localization/. I am using it to translale the Great Dazzling theme to Polish language, and it works very fine:D
Maybe you can try to use this plugin? 😀
BTW. Welcome to open source community 😀
Hi,
Pinbin theme needs some major overhaul and hopefully I will get my hands on it within few weeks. Your mentioned parts of currently are not possible to be translated via .po file.
This was my first WordPress theme I ever created and there are many rough edges that needs to be polished and I am committed to do so.
I will keep you posted.
Sorry for my inconvenience.
Aigars, You have made more for FLOSS, than 99,9% of other people 😀
Everyboby should be greatfull for Your outstanding work.
Thx for Your hard and wonderfull work 😀
Damian,
Thank you for your feedback! I really appreciate it! 🙂
And thanks for keeping an eye on this post as you are always first to answer ever question that users have.
It’s my pleasure, I can help you 😀
Hi Aigars,
Thanks for your tuto, i did a translation file for french language. I succeed in installing it onto my site, but i realize that somme texts didn’t change/appear in the po file.
I can provide you my version, feel free to contact me by mail.
Thank you Chris!
Email sent. Looking forward to your response.
Hi Aigars
Thanks for you great job, I love this theme and I’ve translated it into Chinese, I worked on 1.3.0 and I noticed there is one line missing in the original po file so the corresponding sentence keeps unchanged, wish you could fix it, the detail:
Featured Slider -> How to use the featured slider?
Create Post or Page and add featured image to it.
I’m glad to translate the theme and I’m willing to share my work, you could email me to have the translated po file if you wish. 🙂
Thank you for your contribution!
Will send you an email shortly.
Well, I’ve got it.
It seems that the theme file theme-options.php lacks of a on line 413. Now it works if I add this and add the corresponding msgid/msgstr in the po file
With this could help 🙂
god, the php code disappeared, but I believe you could notice the subtle distinguish on line 413 and around.
I found this error and updated Theme Options as well as original .po file. This will be added on the next theme update.
Thank you for pointing that out!
Hello Aigars,
Thanks for this Theme! It is fun to use.
So, I quickly translated it to Hungarian.
How may I send to po file to you?
Greetings,
Tamás from Budapest, Hungary
Tamas,
Thank you for your contribution! Really appreciate it.
Will add Hungarian translation to the next theme update. And of course I will add you to list of contributors.
You can reach me via support[at]divilab.com.
Btw, Awesome use of Travelify theme! 🙂
Hello Aigars,
I really liked Travelify theme and I’m translating it to Brazilian Portuguese.
Are you interested to make this translation avaliable for everyone?
Sincerely,
Guilherme Santos
Any progress on Brazilian Portuguese translation as I haven’t received an email from you.
Guilherme,
That would be awesome!
Please send me your translation when ready to support[at]divilab.com
Thank you! I highly appreciate your effort!
Hi Aigars! I’m bilingual Spanish/Italian and have translated to both languages. I will send the files to your email so you can make them available for everybody. I’m glad to say I’m not a programmer, just a beginner using WP, but the task was quite easy by following the step by step guide you provided. You’ve done an excellent job!
Marion,
This is so awesome! Can’t thank you enough for your contribution!
Will add Italian and Spanish translations to the next theme version.
Thank you!
hi Aigars
i have translate both theme to arabic, how can I send it to you,
also need a little change as Arabic is RTL
Awesome! 🙂
Please send me translation to suppport[at]divilab.com and I will respond to you ASAP.
I will look into RTL formating when I will receive your translation because right now I don’t have any samples for testing.
Any progress on Arabic translation as I haven’t received an email from you?
Hey, i would like to translate the theme to Romanian. Please tell me where to send the .po file and also please tell me where to find to translate the read more button.
Thank you in advance.
Daniel,
Romanian language would be great!
You can send translation files to support[at]divilab.com.
Read more buttons translation are inside the same default travelify.po file. You just need to create a new file called ro_RO.po based on default language file.
Let me know if you face any problems with translation.
Ok, i`ll get to work and in 1-2 days you`ll have it all translated. But still not finding the readmore button to translate.
“Read more” is inside travelify.po file just like any other text that needs to be translated for this theme.
I made a Dutch translation! It should be in your mailbox by now!
I received your translation and everything looks smooth! Thank you!
I will add it to the next theme update.
Thank you for your incredible contribution!
Hi, I’m planning on doing a webshop USING your theme. I love the fact it’s free. If I’ll make some money I will definitely donate something. Thanks dude!
Thank you for your feedback! I really appreciate it!
Dear Sietze, I really appreciate your work, but the Dutch translation is extremely bad. Every word is literally translated and there are a lot of grammatical errors. There are more incorrect translations than correct ones. That is a pity :-/
Maarten,
You can feel free to contribute to theme translation. It is very easy and won’t take much time to translate the entire thing.
Thank you!
Finally someone gave the right solution, Thank you sooo much 😉
Dear,
Can I have my blog on travelify in two languages? exp English and Spanish at the same time so I can target both groups of readers?
Robert,
Travelify theme is compatible with WPML multilingual plugin (we have an official certificate from them) which means that you can translate your theme in as many languages as you want and use them side by side. You can find more about this plugin here.
Problem with translation.
I want translate “One thought on” (Its about comments under posts and etc)
I have fields:
single: One thought on “%2$s”
plural: %1$s thoughts on “%2$s”
When i try to replace phrases in englesh to Russia and enter “Save” i have trouble window – a format specification for argument 1 doesnt exist in ‘msgstr[0]’.
How i can solve this problem? Please type the solution.
Sergey,
Things such as
%2$sand%1$sshould be left in place when you create translation or otherwise it won’t work. I am not sure about this exact error, but please confirm that you didn’t remove these strings when you tried to translate theme.Aigars,
Look at screenshots:
1) https://yadi.sk/i/R7Vp6a66dsHHV
2) https://yadi.sk/i/d1i9oX4CdsHHb
How i can solve it? Becouse in our language this words in english on that place looks very awkward.
I don’t speak Russian, so I can’t provide you with exact answer but the basic idea is like this:
You keep those special characters and strings in place with no spaces (just like in original English example), so WordPress can understand what it should do. On my example above you can see that I only translated those stings and left everything else in place, however you can move
“%2$s”anywhere in your sentence but it must be there and should look exactly like that with no spaces.Let me know if this helps. Also which theme you are trying to translate?
Aigars,
It is not helps (error do not leave). I translated and save with unknown error. Put in my theme and didnt add in your basic theme files.
Tested on my site – it is works. (Theme is Sparkling).
If you like, you can download files and put it in your basic theme files yourself.
links for download:
https://yadi.sk/d/ZU_18hKidsctj (.mo)
https://yadi.sk/d/x3Pi_8BYdsctq (.po)
Sergey,
I have updated Russian translation for Sparkling theme and pushed it to Github and you can now download it form here: https://github.com/puikinsh/Sparkling
I merged your improvements with existing translation. If it needs any improvements, please let me know.
Thank you for making this theme even bette!
Hello Aigars,
Maybe you could help me to find a theme. I am looking for a theme on which the users can post their articles and after posting a piece of their article and the user avatar including except of author bio are shown on the frontpage.
example: shere2.com.
Could you please guide me to find and buy such a theme?
Thanks alot in advance,
David Nabi
David,
There is no such theme that does this by default. There are some themes that offers a tiny gravatar images in the corner of posts but those themes are not exactly what you are looking for.
However, there is a tiny trick that you can use to get gravatar (avatar images pulled from gravatar service). For that you can use get_avatar function. You can read more about it here.
See how avatar is used inside author bio on for our Sparkling theme (check author box bellow article).
To output this simple image we are using function that you can see here. Number 60 stands for image size in pixels and you can pull larger images from Gravatar service as well.
Instead of using this function to output author avatar in author bio you can output by replacing featured images. This is a simple copy/paste job so no technical knowledge is required. If you still don’t know how to get it done you can always hire someone from oDesk or Freelancer.com to do this job for you. For developer it won’t take more than few minutes to put everything in place.
A very nice tutorial of how to translate WordPress themes is given. The Poedit software package for translating this is also freely available. Thanks a lot for sharing this tutorial. This is going to become my default resource for theme and WordPress plugin translation. Thank you!
Hello,
I am looking to download this on my Microsoft Surface 2 but it is not available. Do you have any solution for this?
Thanks a lot!
Fabio
Fabio,
if you are using Microsoft Surface 2 RT version then you are out of luck as there is very limited apps available for this device and should look for some web services that offers .po file creation and editing online inside your browser. This one works just fine but there are plenty of other services available. If you are using Microsoft Surface 2 Pro (version that comes with a regular Windows and not Windows RT) then above mentioned app will work just fine.
If you translate this theme fully I would really appreciate if you could send translation files to me and I will include it in the next theme update. Thank you!
Here we keep the track of available languages for all of our free themes.
At what address I can send the translation? Greetings!
Héctor,
Please forward it to support[at]divilab.com and will continue discussion there.
Thank you for your amazing contribution! I really appreciate it!
I did the front-end part of the translations, but “read more” and “No Posts Found.” don’t translate for some reason… Any idea why? I noticed “read more” as shown on the website says “Read more” with a capital R in the file. “No Posts Found.” shows up exactly the same. Thanks!
Kuma,
Which theme you are trying to translate and in which language?
Hi Aigars,
Sorry it took me so long to get back with you. I’m still trying to figure out this issue. The theme I’m using is Travelify. Love the theme by the way. I also noticed “Previous” at the bottom doesn’t translate either. I created a .po file and uploaded it to the language folder of Travelify first, then the Child Theme folder. Thanks!
Kuma
Hello Kuma,
Please start your own support thread on our theme support forum and we will look into this problem.
Thanks for you great job, I love this theme and I’ve translated it into Germany … it’s work 100%
im looking for arabic language is it supported in your theme
Zeko,
Travelify does support Arabic and other right-to-left (RTL) languages.
I suggest you use poeditor for translating wordpress themes. It has tons of benefits, translators can work collaboratively in many languages and it supports pot, po, xls, xlsx, strings, xml, resx and properties files.
Thank you for a job .. I use Poedit PRO, very convenient.
Andy,
I am using Poedit for all my WordPress themes as well. It is a very simple tool but has everything to create a fully translatable theme and then allow translators to translate it into any language. And no technical knowledge is required from both sides.
Thanks for sharing
If you want to use the plugin, you recommend any plugins?
Jasa,
Our themes are compatible with plugin called WPML. Which is by far the most flexible plugin to create multilingual websites. You can read more about this plugin here.
Hello Aigars,
I updated the French translation of the Activello theme.
I also discovered that “Logo Only”, “Logo + Tagline”, “Title Only” and “Title + Tagline” are not translated as expected in Site Identity and that “Copyright Text” cannot be translated.
Could you please update the theme ?
Eddy,
Please send your translation via contact form and will check what is going on with these untranslatable strings.
Thank you for helping to make Activello theme even better!
Thank you very much for sharing. But i have some problem. I am using Travelify theme. I want to change theme language to Monglolia. But it is nit work. This theme not accept Mongolian Language? Also this theme not have WPLANG code in wp-content.php section. I can not find it, I am a begginner. Please help how can i change the theme language to Mongolia?
Thanks your support,
Theme is not yet translated into Mongolian language but you can easily translate it by following steps mentioned above.
There is no need to add any code in your wp-config.php file and you can now change language via WordPress dashboard under Settings >> General >> Site Language.
Hi,
I Have A Theme In Turkish Language.I Want To Change It Into English Language.When I Open Its directory,There Is No “Language” Folder Or Po/Mo Files.Can You Plz Tell Me? THANK YOU
Hasnain,
Change WordPress language via Settings -> General -> Site Language to English and you should be good to go. If theme itself doesn’t include language files it will be very difficult to translate it as you will need to create your own translation files and also modify theme in way that those translations will get picked up. If you are not a developer yourself it will be a very difficult task to achieve.
Hello.
I use Illdy theme. I am translating as you describe.
I can translate for example ‘Comments are off for this post’,
but I can’t translate ‘search’ – I didn’t see it in pot file
and I can’t translate ‘Read More’ – I see it in illdy.pot but if I change this text and save po file there is no change on my website.
For ‘Comments are off for this post’ there is no problem. I translated it, save it in the same po file and I see the change on my website.
Marcin,
Please create new thread on our support forum and we will look into this problem: https://colorlibsupport.com/forum/illdy/
Sure, thank you.
Hi,
First of all – I couldnt create an accout so i am psoting the question here.
I am using the shapely theme and would like to have a second language. I read that i can use plugins such as WPML to maintain multiple languages for pages/posts, etc. But i want to know how to be able to maintain them for the shapely widgets in the fornt page.
Any suggestions would be very helpful.
Best, Faz
Faz,
Support forum is the only place where you can receive support for our themes.
Shapely should work with WPML as well. He haven’t got a certificate for it but there shouldn’t be any issues since theme is coded according to all WordPress guidelines.
Hi Aigars,
the registration page is not working.
It sends a verification email which never reaches my mailbox !
How can i register to use the support forum ?
Best, Faz
Checked our database and it appears that your user account is active.
You have even clicked activation link and everything.