The initial idea of our our CarDealer theme is to make it suits to any car business in any part of the world therefore we have made it translation ready. For this purpose the theme comes with the PO files which could be translated with a help of any plugin suitable for PO translation.
Just FYI you can use any plugin for translating PO files since there are lots of available plugins for translation purposes but we would recommend you to use Loco-translate as its free and has user-friendly interface.
So in this post we are going to review on how to work with this specific plugin. First of you would need to download it and get it installed on your website. You can get it downloaded by following this link
Once you downloaded it you can install in a regular way as all WP plugins. And then follow these advises below.
1. Go to the Loco Translate home screen
After you got it installed click the admin menu item that says “Loco Translate” (at the bottom of the left side-bar in the WordPress admin area). Clicking this takes you to the plugin home screen which lists all translatable ‘packages’.
On the home screen you will see all your available themes including CarDealer WP theme.
2.Add a new language
In the CarDealer theme row you should see a button that says “+ New language”. To start translating the theme into another language click this button and you’ll be taken to a new screen where you can choose the language you want.
Select a language from the dropdown list of common languages. In this example we’ll select ‘Spanish’ and the text field below will be automatically populated with the language code “es_ES”
If you’re offered a choice of where to create the new file, always select the global languages directory. You won’t see this choice if only one of the options is found to be writeable, so check your folder setup and make sure it’s the global one. Then click the ‘Start translating’ button and you’ll be taken to the editor screen for translating the theme into Spanish.
3.Translate some string
Once on the editor screen you’ll see all the strings the theme has defined in its template file. Untranslated strings are shown in bold blue. To start with they will all be untranslated. The basics of the editor should be fairly intuitive. Select the English string at the top and enter your translation in the pane at the bottom. You can ignore most of the editor buttons for now. We’re just going to enter a translation and save it.
For our example we’ve picked out the phrase “Page not Found”. Using the text filter at the top of the editor we can find this phrase quickly and select it in the list. Then we enter the text “Página no encontrada” into the bottom pane as our translation. The string at the top now shows a star icon to indicate that our changes are not yet saved.
4. Save your changes
So far our new translation files don’t exist on the server. Above the editor you should see the text “Updated: never”. This just means the files haven’t been created yet. Continue to translate as much as you like and when you’re ready click the Save icon in the editor toolbar. Once the translation file is saved you should see a green success notification. Congratulations, you’ve saved your first WordPress translation file.
If everything has gone well, you now have Spanish translation files on your server for the Cardealer theme. Take a look in the folder you set up earlier and you should see two new files:
wp-content/languages/themes/es_ES.po
wp-content/languages/themes/es_ES.mo
Checking they exist is good for our sanity and helps you see how it all works. The PO file is a human-readable source file. The MO file is the binary file that the Omega theme will ask WordPress to load. Loco Translate has now completed its job. It has compiled a MO file and saved it to disk with the correct name. This is all it does. What happens next is down to WordPress and the theme.
Important part to know – The theme has required plugins for proper work and each plugin has its own PO files so you would need to get these translated as well. Simply scroll down to the plugins section and follow the same instructions for translating plugins PO as for the theme.
This is just a basic instructions and we would recommend you to review the full basic instructions created by Loco team by following this link and for advanced instructions follow this link
In case you would like to make your website multilingual you would need to use WPML plugin which is the best for this purpose and of course our theme is fully compatible with it. This plugin is not free but with purchase you get full documentation and outstanding support provided by developers team. You can find information and introduction video of this plugin by following this link