Using Theme Language Files

David

13 years ago

If you’d like to use our themes in another language, it’s pretty easy to do. This tutorial assumes you already have a .mo file in your language and you’re ready to upload it to your AppThemes site.

In this example, we want to change JobRoller to Brazilian Portuguese. Here are the steps you need to take.

Step 1

Download the language file from our language pack page. Unzip the package and inside you’ll find a pt_BR.mo file. Rename that file to jobroller-pt_BR.mo and then set it aside. We’ll come back to it later.

If a language pack doesn’t exist for your language, you’ll have to create it yourself. Our How to Translate a WordPress Theme tutorial will explain how to do it. If the language pack is missing text strings (like an older version) then you can manually update those yourself. See the “How to Update an Older Translation” section in the previous link.

Step 2

If you haven’t already done so, you’ll need to tell WordPress that it should use Brazilian Portuguese.

As of WordPress 4.0 you can change this directly in the WordPress admin area under “General Settings”. If you do not see this option (or the language you want to switch to) then do the following steps below.

You declare this in the wp-config.php file usually located in the root on your server. You’ll need to use SFTP or SSH in order to edit this file.

Once you are in edit mode, add the following line anywhere. Make sure this doesn’t already exist, however.

define( 'WPLANG', 'pt_BR' );

Now upload that file back to your server and overwrite the old one.

Step 3

Next you need to upload the .mo file to your server. This file contains the actual text translations for the theme. Before doing so, you’ll need to create a couple of new folders. SFTP/SSH back to your site and go into the wp-content folder.

Create a new folder called “languages”
Go inside that folder and create another folder called “themes”
Copy the jobroller-pt_BR.mo file you set aside earlier into this folder

The final new folder structure with the .mo file should look like this.

/wp-content/languages/themes/jobroller-pt_BR.mo

The name of the .mo file is very important. It’s also case sensitive. If it doesn’t match the theme name, language code, and country code it won’t work. Same goes for the define constant in step 2 above.

Links to all codes can be found in this post.

File naming format should be as follows:

[THEME NAME]-[LANGUAGE CODE]_[COUNTRY CODE].mo

Now visit your website and refresh any page (clear your cache too if using a caching plugin). You should now see it in Brazilian Portuguese!

FAQ

Where is my language file directory?
Login to your website and visit the “System Info” page. Under the “WordPress Info” section, look for the “Language File Path” entry. You can also confirm it’s using the correct language by looking at the “Language” entry. This tells you the language and country code naming convention to use for your .mo file.

Why do I have to create new folders for the language file instead of just placing it in the /wp-content/themes/jobroller/ folder?
Because the language file would get deleted if you upgraded to the next version. This wasn’t the case until we moved to two click theme updates back in October, when we had to make this change.

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