Well, im a bit confused, when it comes to trying the following:
We are developing a multi vendor marketplace. Primary for the german market.
For the development process, we had no other chance then using plugins that contain english strings only.
We got the following issue now:
The default language set, and also the language the most users will come from is german.
A lot of the content of the vendor dashboard and so on is in english, due to the foreign plugin.
We don't have that much time for translations and bought the pay as you go credits. We would now like to, in best case automatically, translate everything in our default language german and later in other languages.
How can we archieve that?
If i go to wordpress -> WPML -> String Translation and select the english string of one of the plugins it says:
"Selected strings are not in the site's default language and will not be translated automatically if you're using the "Translate Everything Automatically" mode. Instead, after sending them for translation here, you need to go to the WPML -> Translations page and translate them manually."
We can't manually translate 5.500 strings, as it also containts error messages for example, that we may not see / receive at the current state. 🙁
There is currently a limitation that means it is only possible to use automatic machine translation from the default language to secondary languages.
That is going to change, but it doesn't help right now.
Which plugin are we talking about? The more popular plugins include language files for the most common languages, is that not the case with this plugin?
If not and it is the case that you need to translate the plugin texts, an option would be to create a dummy site with English as the primary language, register WPML on that site, and install the plugin on that site, where it should be possible to translate from English to German.
WPML will generate a .mo file for the plugin, and you could copy that across to the same location on your existing site.
My colleagues recommended doing the translations on the original site rather than what I suggested.
You can use machine translation from within the ATE translation editor, but it requires manual intervention (clicking a button) rather than happening automatically without actually opening the translation editor.
So you would go to WPML > String Translation and choose the text domain for the plugin in question.
That normally shows 25 strings at a time, but you can change that to show 100 at a time, or all of the strings at once.
Now, I just tested showing all at once for a plugin with 500+ strings, and that worked smoothly, but I'm not so sure about 5000+ strings, where it might be necessary but unavoidable to go a page at a time through the strings.
In any case, select all the strings, and send them for translation.
Then go to WPML > Translations and "Translate" this translation job.
That will open the strings in the ATE editor, and you can use the automatic translation button at the top (lightning icon) to machine translate the texts. Then mark the translation as complete.
Quick question before messing up: Can i switch the default language afterwards again to german and it displayes the corect strings from the translation I did, when it was set to english?
Perhaps you misunderstood my last reply. I was talking about working on the original site (where the default language is German and English is a secondary language).
After scanning the plugin, the found strings should be identified as English, and you will be translating them to German. You are essentially just following the steps to "manually" translate the strings, but when you open the strings in the translation editor you can then use machine translation to automatically translate them. It is "automatic translation" with a little manual intervention.
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