How we’re doing it

No, we’re not crazy. We’ve built a powerful resource file localization system, we’re using it ourselves and for a tiny additional cost we can offer free translation for anyone who needs it.

We’re localizing our own themes for wpml.org and icanlocalize.com and we’ve ‘discovered’ that other themes share most of the texts. Stuff like leave a comment, page not found and other texts just repeat in all sites.

Now that we’ve added about a dozen themes (first one is Unsaid Words from our friends at VivaThemes), each new theme includes just a few more words to translate. The rest of the theme’s strings are already translated.

Free translation for your themes too

Let’s start with the fine print. To get free translation for your theme, it needs to meet a few requirements:

• The theme needs to be localization ready (all strings wrapped in gettext calls).
• The theme’s text are in English.
• WPML should run correctly with the theme. If the theme uses standard WordPress API call, it should be fine.
• We’ll only work with friendly people.

Passed all tests? Let’s start!

1. Create a partner account. It’s free and takes a minute.
2. Open a support ticket, tell about your theme and attach it to the ticket.
3. We’ll create a new page for you in our theme localization project. Here’s an example – Unsaid Words translations page.

New features in WPML 1.6.0

WPML can translate other plugins too

WPML can now translate everything in your site, include other plugins. You can do that without asking for any .po file, begging the developers to upload translations or anything else.

Just head over to WPML->Theme and plugins localization.

There, you’ll see a list of all your plugins. Click on the check-boxes next to them and WPML will scan them for texts. In so doing, it also imports all existing translations from any .mo files.

Now, you can continue editing yourself. Click on the Translate button, next to each plugin and you’ll land in WPML’s string translation page. You can translate any text to any language without having to go through those dreaded .mo files, poedit or any other barrier.

Know what you’re translating

Ever wonder what “%1 in %s” means when you’re translating?

WPML now shows you where texts come from, both in the PHP source and in the HTML.

Next to each string you’ll see two icons (when available). When WPML scans the PHP, it keeps track of where the texts for translation come from and will show it to you when you’re translating. Now, you can see exactly where in the source strings appear and (if it manages to find it), WPML can also show where in the HTML.

Bugs fixed

Yeah, bugs are a part of life, but we shouldn’t get used to them. Instead, it’s better to report them in the forum.

And since we’ve got great users who report problems and take their time to explain them to us, we can also fix bugs as they’re discovered. These bugs were fixed in WPML 1.6.0:

• Language fallback for blog posts had a bunch of bugs (broken search, incorrect category pages and tag). They’re all fixed now.
• Added placeholder for _cleanup_header_comment (for compatibility with WP 2.7 and below).
• Fixed some bugs with the tags and the tag cloud.
• Fixed bug with missing comments.
• Added correct Estonian flag.

So, keep those reports coming and we’ll do our best to fix problems as fast as we can.

If you missed it before, this is the download link: WPML 1.6.0 RC1

BTW – we think that this version is good enough to power production sites. It’s live now on our own WPML.org and icanlocalize.com.

Some of the problems are just bugs that we’re fixing but others have to do more with methodology and usage.

What’s working already

Translation Dashboard in WPML

WPML’s translation dashboard allows sending translation jobs and checking on their status.

For now, we’ve sent out two documents to translation – the home and support pages. It’s just a tiny pilot, to see how it’s working.

You select the documents that you want to translate, select which languages and click on ‘Translate’. Feedback is immediate. The status of the document update to ‘Translation in progress’.

Then, when the documents complete the translation, they just appear in the site. We get a notification email saying that they’re ready and that’s it.

What needs fixing

For some strange reason, the HTML in the Spanish home page has changed. The DIV ID of the opening paragraph is gone, making the page look strange.

The English HTML looks like:

<div id="intro">
<h1><strong>WPML</strong> is a WordPress plugin

And the Spanish HTML is:

<div>
<h1><strong>WPML</strong> es un programa

Normally, the way the system works is that all the HTML formatting remains intact (completely unchanged) and only the text is translated. When you send a page for translation, you don’t need to worry about how it looks. It’s supposed to look exactly like the original, just with translated contents.

Why this happened is still unclear. It’s a technical issue that we’re going to fix (hopefully, over the weekend).

Terminology issues

WPML.org speaks to a fairly technical audience – advanced WordPress users and web designers. We’ve asked the translators to keep the informal tone and keep the translation consistent with WordPress terminology in Spanish and German.

However, the word Plugin got translated to programa complementario. It’s linguistically correct, but does it really help? Of course not. To avoid these problems in the future, we’re going to make screen shots of the WordPress admin pages and send them to the translators. These will include a set of English and Spanish/German pages.

This way, the translator can check how each English term appears in his language. It’s going to take a bit of effort getting used to, but will make everything run much faster later on.

Other stuff that still needs testing

WPML’s translation service includes some powerful features behind the hood. One of them is the ability to adjust links between translated pages and posts.  For example, the support page links to the CSS generator. When both these pages are translated to Spanish, the Spanish support page should link to the Spanish CSS generator page.

This works regardless of who’s translated first. When a page is translated WPML checks all the pages that link to it and adjust the links so that they point to the translation.

We’ll be testing this soon, when linked pages are sent for translation.

A full commercial release

We’re aiming for a first public beta of the translation functions by the end of next week. This will run on a few select sites. Then, another one or two weeks and we should be ready for an official release. You can mark a spot somewhere in the middle of June.

Besides fixing bugs (which we’re eagerly working on, as I’m writing these lines), the two most popular requests have been:

• Build a really really flexible language switcher.
• Provide translation for language names (so that Korean displayed as 한국어).

Well, not only that these features are included, but they’re coming in with flying colors.

Your own language switchers

The language switcher is getting country flags added to it and we’re making it extra easy to build your own custom language switchers. You’ll be able to create a horizontal footer, vertical languages list and other more creative ideas.

If you’re familiar with Drupal, for example, you know what it takes to add country icons. It’s very simple (like many things in Drupal). All you need to do is find the frea!*?g module among 4400 other module, download the Alpha version (which is the most up-to-date), install, activate and configure it.

I really hope we don’t get to build that kind of complexity in WPML for any function that we add. If we do, please call and remind us that’s not what you’re expecting!

WPML goes multilingual

We’re making everything about WPML multilingual. After all, it is a multilingual plugin for WordPress.

1. The language names in the language switcher are being translated. We’ve compiled a list of 179 languages and are translating them right now. The first batch of 40 popular languages is already on its way.
2. WPML admin sections are being fully localized. It’s already available in English and Spanish. Next to come would be Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese, Japanese, German, French, and Portuguese.
3. WPML.org is going multilingual. As soon as our translation interface is working, we’re going to start localizing our own contents. Hang in there, it’s very close now.

Managing translation work of this volume

Most of us here are developers and we don’t want to spend too much time managing translation work. Translating a huge list of languages to dozens of languages or maintaining the plugin’s strings in what are now 8 language isn’t something that any of us wants to be made in charge of.

WPML Translation Status - 1 hour after beginning

To automate it all, we’re using our own resource file translation system. This system can read resource files of any type, ranging from CSV (comma separated values), through lists of PHP constants and even PO files. Then, it can translate those files to multiple languages all at once.

When there’s any update (which is quite a common thing with WPML’s PO file), we just upload the new version. The system detects which strings were added or changed and only translates them.

The translation itself is done by professional translators and the system just automates the process. Instead of keeping Excel files with records of what’s been translated already and who’s doing what – the translation system does the book-keeping.

When I started writing this post, I sent the list of 179 language names to translation. Including lunch, two hours have passed and we’re now half way through the translation for most languages and already completed with some of them. It looks like it’s going to be ready for the 0.99 release, we’re planning for Monday.

Features are grouped into different sections including navigation, multilingual system and content translation. Many of these features are a result of great feedback we got from folks in the forum. Since many of the people visiting the forum are web designers, many of the new planned features have to do with the navigation.

Navigation highlights

For example, we’re working on adding arbitrary HTML to the navigation menus. You’ll be able to create fancy top menus with your own HTML, including images and any styling you want. WPML will call theme functions that will be able to return any HTML for each menu item.

Multilingual system highlights

In the multilingual system, the most frequently requested feature is being able to customize the language selector – so that’s next on our todo list. We’re working on allowing to build custom language selectors which can be used in the theme in different locations. You can add your own list of languages as simple links (good for placement in the footer) or a fancy list with country flags (good for header or sidebar).

Another important feature is being able to translate texts that are outside of pages and posts. This will include the tagline, text widgets and other texts.

Content translation

Last, but not least, is the content translation section. I’ve already written a bit about how WPML will be able to translate contents last week and it’s finaly getting ready for full release. Most of it is working and being tested right now. We’re still on schedule and planning to release this commercially during May.

Check it out and let us know what you think!

You can check out the complete list in the roadmap page. If you’ve got a killer feature that absolutely must become a part of WPML, let us know. It’s never too late.

It’s just a pilot language. Soon, we’re adding other popular languages including German, French, Japanese and Chinese. And, when our translation integration is finally working, we’ll also have wpml.org localized to these languages.

Anyway, back to this release…

Besides adding Spanish translation, WPML 0.9.8 also fixes these bugs:

• Fixed compatibility issues with Windows servers. Several users were kind enough to report and detail the activation problems on Windows servers. The bug came down to file access permission, which is fixed now.
• Fixed bug with sticky post. There was a MySQL query error when sticky posts were saved, causing all sorts of strange side effects.
• Fixed search function.
• Prev/Next links for category archive pages are now working again.
• Add warning about disabled JavaScript (which is required for the plugin to work).
• Added debug information for hunting down stubborn bugs.

Other frequent issues we ran to recently were due to very old MySQL servers (4.0) or disabled JavaScript.

As always, we appreciate all the great feedback we’ve been getting. Keep reporting problems in the forum – it’s a great help to the development effort.