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How To Build a Multilingual Vendor Marketplace With Dokan and WPML

Dario
Updated
September 19, 2023

Dokan plugin allows you to build a multi-vendor marketplace on top of WooCommerce. Learn how to translate such a site with WPML and allow vendors to translate their products. 

On This Page:

Translating the Site vs. Translating Vendor Products

There are two major roles on multi-vendor sites built using Dokan and WPML:

  • Site owner – the person who owns and is responsible for the whole site. They are responsible for setting up and translating the whole site.
  • Vendors – sellers that have their own separate selling space on the marketplace site. They are responsible for setting up and translating their own products.

If you’re a site owner, proceed with the next section and learn how to set up and configure your marketplace site.

If you’re a vendor, jump to the section about translating vendor products.

Setting Up and Translating the Site

Start by installing, activating, and configuring the following:

If you’re new to WPML, check out our Getting Started Guide. It quickly walks you through different translation options you can use.

We also recommend checking out our documentation about translating your WooCommerce stores.

Selecting the Translation Mode

WPML’s Translate Everything Automatically mode can translate all your site’s content automatically. However, this isn’t practical on a typical Dokan site because it would include automatically translating all products from all vendors. For large marketplaces, this could be quite costly.

Because of this, you should select the Translate What You Choose mode in the WPML setup wizard. This way you can easily decide which content you want to translate and how.

Enabling Vendors to Translate Their Products

To allow vendors to translate their products, make sure to allow them to access the WordPress admin. For this, go to Dokan → Settings and in the Site Options section, deselect the option Disallow Vendors and Customers from accessing the wp-admin dashboard area.

Allowing vendors to access WordPress admin so they can translate their products

Translating Pages

As a site owner, you’re the one responsible for setting up and translating pages like “Contact Us”, “About Us”, and others.

To translate a page yourself, go to Pages in the main WordPress admin menu. Click on a plus icon for the page and language you want to translate.

Starting a manual translation of a page

The Advanced Translation Editor will open, and you can easily translate your page.

Alternatively, you can go to WPML → Translation Management and send pages to be translated by others. This includes your own translators with access to the site or a professional translation service.

Translating WooCommerce Pages

WooCommerce creates some of the store-related pages automatically. Check out our documentation page to learn how to translate the Cart and Checkout pages.

Translating Texts from the Theme, Plugins, and Other Places

Besides content coming from posts and pages on your site, there are usually some additional texts coming from your theme and plugins.

To learn how to translate these texts, read our documentation page about translating strings.

Translating Menus

With WPML, you can easily synchronize your menus across all your site’s languages. For more information, please check our page about translating menus.

Translating Vendor Products

As a vendor, you’re in charge of creating and translating your products. The site owner should have allowed you access to the WordPress backend. After logging into the site, you will see the WordPress admin area with a limited number of options in the menu.

Vendors can access the WordPress backend but have a limited number of options

These are the steps to translate your products:

  1. Click to go to the Products page. There, click the plus icon to translate any product into the language you want.
Starting the translation of a vendor product
  1. This takes you to the Advanced Translation Editor. Use it to translate all of the texts for that product. When you’re done translating, click Complete.
Translating a vendor product using WPML’s Advanced Translation Editor

When translating a product, you can see and translate any information related to it. This includes:

  • Product Categories
  • Product Tags
  • Product Attributes

And that’s it! The product will now appear translated on your vendor store’s front-end.

Translated vendor product

You can use these same steps to translate any of your vendor products.

If you notice some other texts on the site that are not translated and are coming from a theme or other plugins, contact the site owner. They are responsible for translating this kind of text.

Known Issues

WPML works fine with this plugin, but sometimes there could be minor issues we're working on. This is expected as both plugins provide frequent updates.

Current unresolved issues:

You can also search all known issues including previously resolved issues for this plugin.

Getting Help From Our Support

If you need help translating your site built using Avada and WPML, visit WPML’s support forum.

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