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Topics: Getting set up

Languages & Text

2 min readApplies to every PremiumPress theme · 12.x
Walkthrough comingA short screen recording of this guide is planned. The written steps below are complete.

Languages & Text

Translating the theme, and changing individual words.

How languages work in v12​

Themes no longer ship with translations bundled in the ZIP. Languages are installed on demand, one click each, from our CDN. This keeps the download small — a site only ever needs the one or two languages it actually uses.

Installing a language downloads that locale's compiled .mo file into wp-content/languages/themes/, which is the standard WordPress location. Two things follow from that:

  • Updates never overwrite it. The file lives outside the theme folder.
  • Nothing else has to be configured. WordPress picks the translation up automatically once your site language is set.

Your site language is a WordPress setting, at Settings ▸ General ▸ Site Language.

The mechanics are documented in the reference under Languages.

If your server has no outbound internet access​

The installer fetches over HTTPS at the moment you click it. On a firewalled server, download the .mo yourself and place it at wp-content/languages/themes/ppt-<locale>.mo — for example ppt-de_DE.mo for German.

Accuracy of translations​

Translations are community-contributed and we cannot guarantee every string is right. Anything that reads badly can be corrected on your own site without waiting for us — see below.

Changing individual words​

Most people don't need a translation at all — they want to change a handful of words ("Listing" → "Property", say). Two options:

Quick text edits. For a small number of strings, edit them directly rather than translating the whole theme.

Loco Translate. For systematic changes, the free Loco Translate plugin edits translation files from wp-admin. Save your work into a custom location when Loco offers the choice, so a theme update cannot overwrite it.

Multi-language sites​

Running the site in several languages at once needs a multilingual plugin (WPML, Polylang or similar) on top of the theme. That plugin owns the language switching, the per-language pages, and the translated menus and categories; the theme supplies the translated interface strings underneath.

Category and taxonomy names created during setup are written once, in the language active at that moment. They are ordinary database records after that — translate them with your multilingual plugin, not by reinstalling.