Translate WordPress Themes and Plugins Using Loco Translate

ThemeGrill Themes and Plugins are completely Translation ready. It means you can easily translate the hardcoded (source) text in the themes and plugins without breaking anything else on your website or the plugin itself. And guess what? It is super easy!

This tutorial will guide you step-by-step on how to translate the WordPress Themes.

There are many third-party plugins to translate themes, but we will use Loco Translate for this demo. Loco Translate is extremely easy to use and supports both themes and plugins.

Step 1: Install and Activate the Loco Translate Plugin

For installing the plugin, you can follow the guideline on How to Install a WordPress Plugin (Step by Step Guide)

Step 2: Translate the WordPress Theme

Once the plugin is activated, click on the Loco Translate menu on the WordPress dashboard. The Loco Translate listing should appear on the dashboard now; click on Themes to start translating your theme.

A list of themes available will be shown to you here. Click on the correct theme that you want to translate. We will be using ColorMag Theme here.

To translate your theme, follow these steps:

• Click on New Language 
• Choose a language under WordPress language in which you would like the Translation to happen.
• Then on Choose a location, Click on the bottom option that will be shown as languages/themes/(your_theme_name)-{locale}.po.

We recommend you choose this location as this will save your languages in a separate language folder, and WordPress or theme updates will not change them. Click on Start translating, and your new language should be set up.

• In the next window, Loco Translate will pull all the hardcoded (source) texts of the theme.
• In the source text window, click on any of the text you want to translate.
• Then, move to the translate window below under the Source text window and insert the Translation you want to provide.
• Click on save after you are done translating the text to save the theme settings, and the translations for the required settings should be set.

You can quickly check if the settings have been applied by changing your WordPress’ language to the required language.

For this, click on Settings on your WordPress Dashboard and refer to General.

Then click on the Site language drop-down menu and change the site language to the required language.

Once done, you can refresh and check your site, which displays the translated text.