How to Find and Translate WordPress Plugins

How to Find a Translatable WordPress Plugin

If you’re building a multilingual WordPress site, there are four things you need to find translations for:

  • The WordPress core
  • Your content
  • Your theme
  • Your plugins

In a previous tutorial, we took a look at how to find a multilingual theme. In this guide, we’re going to take a look at how to find multilingual plugins. Not every plugin has been translated or is capable of being translated.

Video on finding translatable plugins

This video is taken from the “How to Build Multilingual Sites With WordPress” class on YouTube.

Translate WordPress plugins on WordPress.org

WordPress does a wonderful job of managing the translation of WordPress plugins. The first place to look for when you want to translate WordPress plugins is translate.wordpress.org. Click on any of the languages you’re interested in. For this example, I’m going to click on “Polish”:

wordpress core translations

At the top of the next screen is a link called “Plugins”. This will show you plugins that have been translated into Polish.

find and translate WordPress plugins into Polish

On the next screen, you’ll see an overview of all the plugins that have been translated into Polish. In this example, there a 509 plugins with some form of Polish translation.

translate WordPress plugins into polish

It’s worth noting that the “Progress” bar is a little deceptive. Click on the project and then choose stable latest release. In this example, I’ve clicked on “Easy Digital Downloads”.

translate WordPress plugins - stable release link

Now you get to the page which shows translations for the stable version of the plugin. At the top you’ll see a breadcrumbs link for projects. Click on the plugin name in the breadcrumbs.

translate WordPress plugins - click the name link

We now get this wonderful chart shown below. This chart tells us the percentage of translation in any given language. The only column that’s really important is “Stable”. The other columns such as “Development” or “Readme” are rarely important. As you can see, Easy Digital Downloads is 99% translated for English (Canada) 100% for Spanish, French and Danish. Scroll further down and you’ll see less progress, including 88% for Japanese, and 93% for Italian. You may recall on the front of the page it gave a figure of 21% translated. That’s because we have all of these other languages such as Greenlandic and Silesian which are not very well translated at all. So the key here is to find the languages that matter to you.

easy digital downloads translate WordPress plugins

Before we move on, it’s worth pointing out that anyone in the whole world can create a free account on this site and translate WordPress plugins. So if there’s a plugin that’s important to you and it lack support for a specific language, you can log in and either translate it yourself or hire someone to do it.

Translate WordPress plugins outside of WordPress.org

It is tricker to find translations for commercial WordPress plugins. Because commercial code can’t be listed on WordPress.org, they don’t have the benefit of the excellent set up we’ve seen above.

Gravity Forms is a plugin that is commercial only. There is no free version so anytime you come across a plugin like that you should look under look around their site. On the Gravity Forms site, you can find translations by clicking on “Support” in the main menu.

gravity forms translate WordPress plugins

Click on “Language Translations” and there’s this whole page about how to get the different translations for the plugin. Not only that, but Gravity Forms has many add-ons and those are also translated. There are some external translations available made by other people and then there’s information on how to translate it yourself if you need a language that isn’t listed.

gravity forms authors

Another example is Restrict Content Pro. If we click on “Support” and then “Documentation”, you can use the search box for translation articles. It will bring up this article called “Can I translate Restrict Content Pro into my language?

That page says that it’s already in 9 different languages, although some may be incomplete. I also goes on to say how to make your own so that if the language you need is not supported you can easily add it. Any good commercial plug-in is going to have documentation like this so my recommendation. If you can find the translation documentation, I’d advise you to start looking for an alternative plugin.

Hopefully this guide will help you translate WordPress plugins. If you have any questions, please feel free to leave them in the comments.

More Reading on Multilingual WordPress Topics

You can also check out more WordPress multilingual tutorials from OSTraining:

Author

  • Steve Burge

    Steve is the founder of OSTraining. Originally from the UK, he now lives in Sarasota in the USA. Steve's work straddles the line between teaching and web development.

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