Just purchased the X theme today and am very impressed with its capabilities and how well it functions. However, I am having an issue that I’m hoping you can help me with.

My website (http://puromac.com) is a Spanish-language blog for a podcast. We have the language set as es_ES and it works correctly in the admin screen as well as previous themes we’ve used.

I noticed that, even without creating my own es_ES.po file for the X theme, many terms were translated. The translated terms appear to come from the WP core translation file.

Because I expected to make many changes, I created a child theme, and mirrored the path /framework/lang in the child theme directory. Then I copied the default.po file from the main theme directory into the child mirrored path, changed the name to es_ES.po and set about to translate the strings. What I wanted to do specifically is translate the string “Home”, in order to change how it appears in the breadcrumbs.

However, creating the language file doesn’t change any of the strings that I want to affect. Any thoughts on what I might be doing wrong?

Incidentally, there is at least one string that isn’t wrapped with a _e() or __() call, and so it will never get translated. The first one I can ran across is the string “Read more” which appears under blog excerpts. To translate it, I had to overwrite two functions from miscellaneous.php (x_excerpt_string and x_content_string).

Thanks.

Thanks for writing in and for your kind words! We always appreciate hearing that around here.

Regarding the Read More strings for the excerpt and content, we have corrected this and it will be available as a native fix in the coming update. Thank you for bringing this to our attention. It’s easy for little strings like that to fly under the radar sometime, so we’re always grateful to have a little assistance in pointing out areas that we have overlooked.

As for the language file issue, I’m going to have another member of our staff look into this for you as soon as he is available as he is much more experienced at translation situations like this. I will make sure that he is aware of this thread and he will respond to you as soon as possible.

Thanks!

I forgot to mention that I also duplicated the default.po and default.mo files into the child theme lang directory. Not sure if that was needed, but thought it might help when I wasn’t seeing my translation come through.

I’ll wait to hear back on the language issue.

what plugin are you using for translation your site? WPML? You normally should not need the default.po file after you’ve created a translation of that template file to your own native language. So you only use it as a blueprint to translate all the values into your language and then you use a plugin like WPML to utilize it. What surprises me is that you’ve said that it got translated automatic because normally you have to translate all the strings on your own. Let me know what you’ve did exactly so I can recreate your steps and look into it. Thanks!

Thanks for getting back to me.

Regarding the automatic translation, what I mean is that a few places look like they are using WP’s translation file. For example, the dates which appear at the top of posts are in Spanish, as is the text in the comments area which normally reads “Leave a comment” (on my site it reads ‘Deja un comentario’). However, most strings are not being translated, such as the word “Home” in the breadcrumbs and “Search” in the search widget.

I’m not using a plugin at all. Perhaps that’s my problem. 🙂

I thought that, as with my previous themes, I could just place corresponding po and mo files in the theme’s language directory, name them correctly, and provide my translation by updating the message string (ex: msgid “Search” msgstr “Buscar”). Do child themes work differently and require a language plugin?

In the meantime, I’ll remove the default files from my child theme directory.

since we are not providing a spanish translation out of the box you have to use the default.po and translate it yourself into spanish and then use it. The best thing to start is getting poEdit or a similar program that can open .po files. Then you open our default.po file and start translating it into your own language. Once you’ve done that you save it as es_ES.po in the same folder /framework/lang/.

Once you’ve done that you open your wp-config.php file in your WordPress root folder and look for:

define('WPLANG', '');>

and replace it with:

define('WPLANG', 'es_ES');

Now your theme should be fully translated.

Thank you for your help. With your message as a guide, I figured out what was wrong with my set up. To help other developers with the same issue, I’ll summarize what I did.

1. We already had WPLANG set to es_ES, which is why the admin interface and other parts of the site appeared in Spanish, so that wasn’t part of the problem.
2. I duplicated default.po and renamed the file es_ES.po.
3. Then I used poEdit to edit the file. I had tried this before, but the latest version of poEdit (1.6) was unusable on my Mac because it crashed when I tried to open any file. So, I got version 1.5.7 and that worked without crashing.
   • By the way, .po files are just text files so you could use a regular text editor to translate them. However, .mo files seem to have special characters in them and are built differently. poEdit properly creates a matching .mo file. I read an incorrect blog post that said I could just duplicate the .po file and rename it with a “.mo” extesion. I’m sure this was the reason my translation wasn’t working.
4. I placed the new es_ES.po and es_ES.mo files in the parent’s /framework/lang directory. When my translation wasn’t working, I mistakenly thought that I needed to mirror the lang directory under the child theme.

thanks for that explanation and great that everything seems to work now! If you need anything else let me know!

1. create your localized .po and .mo files and save them in: child-theme-dir/lang/de_DE.po
2. edit the child-theme´s function.php file and add the following lines at the beginning:

add_action( 'after_setup_theme', 'my_child_theme_setup' );
function my_child_theme_setup() {
    load_child_theme_textdomain( '__x__', get_stylesheet_directory() . '/lang' );
}

That´s the recommend way by the wordpress codex.

Hope that helps.
Thomas