Translation for texts by other plugins and themes
WPML helps translate texts that are created by other plugins and by the theme. We’ll start with an example.
The popular Contact Form 7 plugin creates contact form that can be added to your site. You can use the default fields (like name and email) and add your own. When visitors see the site in different languages, the contact form needs to appear in those languages too.
If all the texts are hard coded into the plugin they can be localized using gettext (the plugin’s .mo file). However, how do ou handle texts that the user enters? If the user adds a new field to the contact form, like ‘Profession’, it cannot be translated using the theme’s .mo file. The user needs to be able to provide translation for this text.
String translation in WPML
WPML includes a mechanism for translating this kind of texts. By default, it helps users translate the blog’s title, tagline, text widgets and other texts that WordPress generates. Other plugins and the theme can also use this mechanism to provide translation for texts that they need to display.
1. Register the strings that need translation
When the user creates new strings or updates existing strings, these need to be registered in WPML’s string table. To do this call:
icl_register_string($context, $name, $value)
- $context – the name of the plugin, in a human readable format
- $name – the name of the string which helps the user (or translator) understand what’s being translated.
- $value – the string that needs to be translated.
In our contact form example, when we add a new field (called ‘Profession’), we would then call:
icl_register_string('Contact Form 7', 'Input field label', 'Profession')
This would tell WPML that the string ‘Profession’ needs to be translated. When users go to translate it, they would see that it’s part of the ‘Contact Form 7′ plugin and that it’s an ‘Input field label’.
If the plugin no longer needs to have a certain text translated (for example, if the user deleted that field from the contact form), the string can be removed from the translation table using this call:
icl_unregister_string($context, $name)
2. Using the translation when displaying
When the contact form plugin displays, it needs to get the translations and use them. To do this, it uses the icl_t function:
icl_t($context, $name, $value)
WPML looks for a string with matching $context and $name. If it finds it, it looks for translation in the current language (the language in which the site is displayed). If translation exists, it will return it. Otherwise, it will return the original string.
The $value argument is supplied to icl_t() call so that in case WPML wasn’t active when the string was created, and it’s not registered, the normal string value is still returned.
The way string translation works internally in WPML
WPML includes a string translation interface, which lists the strings and allows managing their translation.
WPML's string translation interface
When users click on translations for a string, a multi-language translation panel opens up, allowing to edit the translation per language. Each translation includes a complete flag. If translations to all the languages are complete, the string itself is also marked complete.
When the string changes, all its translations are marked as incomplete, so that users know that the translations need to be revised.
All string editing is done within the same WordPress admin interface and doesn’t require any external calls to external services.
How to integrate WPML’s string translation with plugins and themes
When integrating the string translation in plugins, or in themes, it’s important to make sure that the calls exist.
The calls to WPML’s string translation functions should be wrapped in if_function_exists() statements. This way, if WPML is activate, it will be called. Otherwise, the normal operation is kept.
Additionally, plugin developers should consider the case where WPML is activated long after the user begins using their plugin. In this case, the call to icl_register_string isn’t made when new strings are created and they will never be translated. To overcome this, it’s a good idea to register all the user strings every time the admin screen for the plugin is loaded.
This will add a negligible execution time, but would guarantee that all strings are always sent to translation and are up-to-date. The code can test once to see that the icl_register_string exists and then call it to register all the strings users can enter.
If this function is called with blank or NULL values, it’s ignored by WPML. If the string already exists and is unmodified, the call is ignored too. It only has an effect if new or modified strings are registered.
The entire translation table is cached in memory so repeatedly calling it takes very little processing power.
What needs to be sent to translation
Let’s start with what doesn’t need to be registered using icl_register().
WPML uses different posts, pages, tags and categories for different languages. This means that if a site includes these two pages – example.com/about/ and example.com/es/sobre/ they would be different WordPress pages.
Any text that’s added per page would already appear in multiple languages, as the user would simply enter the correct text for the language in which that page is written.
What needs to be translated using WPML’s string translation are texts that don’t belong to any post, page, tag or category. For example, SEO plugins allow entering texts for the home page title, keywords and description. This text does need to be translated using WPML’s string translation. This way, it will display translated for different language home pages.
English 
简体中文 
Deutsch 
日本語 
Español 
Subscribe via RSS
Follow
Wonderful !
But… what about images that we can add with HTML into text widgets… the text is translated but the images don’t appears.
The images will not be translated automatically. You should create other images with translations for the texts there, and then include them in the translated HTML.
[...] WPML 的字符串翻译屏幕翻译字符串 [...]
[...] あなたはWPMLの文字列翻画面を使って文字列を翻訳します。 [...]
[...] Usted podrá traducir las cadenas desde la pantalla de traducción de cadenas de WPML. [...]
Hello,
I’m usin the plugin PostLists
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/postlists/
Im getting a list of posts in my default language. But when I change the language, I get the same list, no way to get the list of posts in the second language.
I tried to create a second category as a translation’s category, but PostLists cannot see this new category.
Any idea?
Thanks
It appear that PostLists isn’t using the normal WordPress API to access the database, but is querying the database directly. It’s surprising that it even works without WPML after all the WP updates.
You can try to contact PostLists author and get them to update their plugin. It’s a simple update that doesn’t have anything to do with WPML. We can still help with technical advice.
Amir
Thanks a lot Amir,
I found a solution
I activated :
Activate expert mode (only if you really know what you are doing)
And then s easy coz I can put the category ID
It works erfect
It was just a bit confused coz of the “(only if you really know what you are doing)”
maybe something like “(using IDs and numbers)” will clarify more
Anyway, thanks a lot for your work, congratulations
I am using Tiny Contact Form wordpress plugin
I do not understand how i can translate input fields
they are hard coded into the plugin
if i use .mo file (wp-content/languages) it do not change field translations if i choose between the languages
any advice?
thanks,
Amy
Support for translating user inputs need to be built into the plugin. You can ask the author of Tiny Contact Form to include it and we’ll be very happy to help.
In the mean while, there is an excellent contact form plugin which you can use that already includes full multilingual support. It’s Contact Form 7:
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/contact-form-7/
You can find instructions for translating the field names here:
http://ideasilo.wordpress.com/2009/07/22/contact-form-7-2-0/
[...] WPML 的字符串翻译屏幕来翻译字符串 [...]
Where should icl_register_string($context, $name, $value) be added?
Thanks,
Hi,
You posted following example above:
icl_register_string($context, $name, $value)
icl_register_string(‘Contact Form 7′, ‘Input field label’, ‘Profession’)
2nd parameter is used both for distinguishing different strings internally, and for displaying. Therefore we usually have to provide English descriptions for strings. This is not good, because translator may not know English, but know two other languages very well. I suggest to add new parameter to pass description string, which can be translated using standard po/mo files. Could you implement this feature? With this, we will be able do such call:
icl_register_string(‘Contact Form 7′, ‘Input field label’, ‘Profession’, __(‘Input field label’, ‘my-plugin’))
Excellent plugin !
I would like to know where I should add icl_register_string($context, $name, $value) in order to get the plugin’s source code crawled by wpml.
thank you!
icl_register_string is used for dynamic strings that users enter, not for the PHP code itself.
WPML 1.6.0, coming out very soon, will be able to scan the PHP code and automatically extract all the gettext code for plugins, like it’s doing for the theme now.