Translations

Introduction

When an admin switches the language in WordPress, Awesome Support will generally automatically switch to the same language. However, for some languages not all terms may be translated. For these terms, you can add your own translations.

In order to translate the un-translated terms, you start with a file that contains the entire list of terms. This file is located in the languages folder and has an extension of .POT

The core plugin and each add-on ships with a standard POT file. The file can then be used by many popular translation tools to create your own .PO and .MO files that render the text in the language of your choice.

There is usually only one POT file in the Languages folder for each plugin or add-on. For the core Awesome Support plugin, the file is named awesome-support.pot

Translating A New Language

To start the translation process for the core plugin you copy the awesome-support.pot file to the new language file with a .PO extension. For example, if you wanted to begin a brand new translation for Hindi, you would:

Copy the awesome-support.pot file to a new file named awesome-support-hi_IN.po.
Edit that file to include the translated terms
Convert the new file to one that WordPress can read (known as a .MO file)

WordPress only reads files with the .MO extension so converting from the human-readable .PO format to the machine readable MO format is critical.

You will need to use a tool such as POEDIT to convert your new PO file to an MO file. This tool can also provide a nice visual interface for entering the translated terms into your PO file.

If your translations are not specific to your business and can benefit all users you should use our crowd-sourced translation projects instead. It is easier and faster and will ensure that your translations are not overwritten on each update. See Using POEDITOR.COM for Translations for more information.

Please note that we already have full or partial translations for a lot of languages so the section below might be more applicable to you if you wanted to start with our existing translations and add your own to them.

Working With The Existing Translations

There are many languages already included with the core plugin – some of them include 100% of the strings already translated while others include only a subset of the strings translated. However, the plugin only ships with the .MO files. In order to get a copy of the human-readable .PO files you will need to download them. You can download them from the links located on this page: Links to Existing PO Files.

Download the file for the language you are interested in and place it in the Languages folder.
Edit the file to reflect your translations
Convert the file to an MO format – you will need to use a tool such as POEDIT to convert your new PO file to an MO file.
Make sure the final .MO file is placed in the LANGUAGES folder.

If your translations are not specific to your business and can benefit all users you should use our crowd-sourced translation projects instead. It is easier and faster and will ensure that your translations are not overwritten on each update. See Using POEDITOR.COM for Translations for more information.

Addons

The core plugin has been translated into a number of languages by volunteers. Most popular languages have had at least some of the strings translated. The add-ons, however, do not have as many languages readily available but you can translate them using the included .POT files at any time. The process is similar to the one described above for the core plugin:

Copy the existing POT file to the new language file
Edit the new file
Convert to an MO file.

Sharing Your Language Skills

If you would like contribute to the translation effort, you can join the projects on www.poeditor.com. By performing your translations on this site you can share your language skills with other users and, in turn, they will share their language skills with you!

Please see our document, Using POEDITOR.COM For Translations, to learn more.

Learn how to use POEDITOR.com for translations.