Skip Navigation
Updated
September 19, 2023

Extend your store’s multilingual experience beyond your site. With WPML and WooCommerce Multilingual, you can translate WooCommerce emails.

WooCommerce sends a variety of order-related emails to your customers. These emails are sent in the customer’s admin language as defined in their user profile.

On This Page:

Getting Started

To translate WooCommerce emails make sure you install and activate the following WPML plugins:

All these plugins come with the WPML Multilingual CMS and WPML Multilingual Agency accounts.

Translating WooCommerce Default Emails

Default WooCommerce emails are already translated for you.

If you want to customize any of these emails, go to WooCommerceSettings and click the Emails tab. Then, click Manage to edit the text of an email.

Where to customize your WooCommerce emails

After you save your changes, click the Translations link below any of the fields.

Clicking the Translations link after saving your updates

This opens the new text in WPML’s String Translation. Click the plus icon to add and save your translations.

Adding translations for your updated emails

Now, when a customer purchases your site’s secondary language, they will receive the custom email translated into their language.

Translated confirmation email

Changing Default Translations

Emails also include default text that can’t be changed in the WooCommerce settings. If you want to update the default translations, you need to scan the WooCommerce plugin to make these strings available in String Translation.

Go to WPMLTheme and plugins localization and scan WooCommerce for strings.

Scanning WooCommerce for strings

Then, go to WPMLString Translation. Search for the string, and click the plus icon to add your own translation.

Searching for an email string and adding a different translation

Translating Custom-Coded WooCommerce Emails

You can override WooCommerce’s default emails by changing the PHP templates or by creating your own custom PHP templates. To translate these custom templates, be sure to wrap your strings in a gettext function to tell WPML they are translatable.

Example:

<p><?php printf( _e( 'CUSTOM TEXT', 'woocommerce' ); ?></p>
Wrapping strings to tell WPML they are translatable

Then, scan your theme for the strings by going to WPMLTheme and plugins localization. Select your theme and scan it.

Scanning the theme for strings

Now, when you go to WPMLString Translation, the text from your custom email is available for translation. Click the plus icon to add the translations.

Translating texts from custom WooCommerce emails using WPML String Translation

Troubleshooting

If you’re still having trouble finding the strings to translate your WooCommerce emails, please see our documentation about finding strings that don’t appear in the String Translation table.