WordPress is, without a doubt, the best CMS in the world. But it has a problem. Is American. Or at least its main developers are. And that means that on more than one occasion we have some phrases or words in English or poorly translated.
Let’s see how to change any word or text in both WordPress, themes and plugins, either because it is not translated or because the translation is bad.
The first thing we have to do is install and activate , a free plugin with which we will manage all the translations easily.
When we do, a new menu will appear in the administration panel, with two sections. “Manage translations” and “Translate options”.
If we select the first of the two options we will see a list of themes and plugins, where we can see how many languages it is translated into, information about the .PO and .POT files, the status of the translation, and if the file permissions are correct:
Next we have to click on the translation language that we want to modify. In this case, es_ES : Spanish (Spain), to translate or modify any phrase into Spanish:
And then you will see a control panel that may scare you a bit. But don’t worry, it’s much easier than it seems, and we don’t really have to use all the options that are shown to us. By the way, first of all, I would hit the “Sync” button, to make sure we have the latest translation version, ok? 🙂
And now we simply have to search the list for the phrase we want to translate. We can find it both by searching for its original language in English (in case it is not translated), such as the translation in Spanish, if we want to modify a poor translation or one that we do not like. Here we have the list:
The fastest way to find any text is the search engine that we have at the top right. Suppose, for example, that we want to modify the text “Leave a reply” that we can see below:
Well, we simply have to search for part of that text in the search box, and it will automatically show us the original text and the translation:
And now we simply have to modify the phrase “Leave a reply” to whatever we want in the lower editor. For example we will change it to “Leave a comment”:
Then we save the changes and a green message will appear informing us that the changes have already been made to the necessary files:
And believe it or not, here we are. If we visit our website again, we will see how the sentence has changed and the new one is already shown:
The plugin also allows us to do more things, such as downloading .MO, .PO files, synchronizing with the .POT file, modifying WordPress core translations, saving translation backups, using external translation commands, and even adding new languages for which there is no translation. But the basics we have covered in this tutorial.
If you want to know more about WordPress, translations, adding languages and other things, I recommend that you subscribe to , in which I cover these points and many more through guided video tutorials in real time. In addition to learning a lot, you will help me move forward so that I can continue publishing these tutorials 🙂
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