Translating Suffusion

Suffusion supports theme translation and users are encouraged to help maintain translations of the theme. As things stand at present, there are 26 different translations available, apart from English. If you want to contribute translations for additional languages please feel free to do so from the Support Forum.

This page provides all available translations and gives instructions on how to use them or create your own translations:

1. Available Translations
2. How to Create Your Own Translation
3. How to Use Translations – Basic
4. How to Use Translations – Advanced
5. Keeping Up with Changes on Custom Translations
6. Submitting Your Translation

Available Translations

The last change to the translations was done in version 3.7.1 of the theme. Any translation in the table below that has a freshness lower than 3.7.1 is bound to have some untranslated text.

How to Create Your Own Translation

Creating translations is not difficult at all. All you need are the following:

1. The core translation file, suffusion.po. This is present in the translation folder of suffusion. In your WP installation you can locate it in wp-content/themes/suffusion/translation, assuming that your theme is installed in the “suffusion” folder.
2. A translation tool like POEdit. This is a free utility that makes translations easy.

Once you have both, follow these instructions:

1. Make a copy of the file suffusion.po. Name it based on the language you want to translate to. See the WordPress Codex for the list of language codes. For example if you are creating a Hindi translation you will name your file hi_IN.po (hi = Hindi, IN = India). The language and the country are both important because of linguistic differences by region. As a result Portuguese for Portugal (pt_PT) is different from Portuguese for Brazil (pt_BR), and Norway as a country has two language variants, Bokmål (nb_NO) and Nynorsk (nn_NO).
2. Once you have your language-specific PO file, open it in POEdit. POEdit is fairly intuitive and you can translate the file appropriately. If you are in need of further instruction, there are several tutorials out there, including one by Justin Tadlock that I frequently reference.
3. When you have finished your translation and saved it in POEdit, it will automatically create a file with an extension “mo”. So you will now have a PO file and an MO file. These are your translation files.

How to Use Translations – Basic

Once you have got your PO and MO files (either by creating them yourself or by downloading them from here), there are different ways to use them:

• Approach 1 – Child Themes
  This is the safest and most recommended approach. For this approach:
  1. Create a child theme.
  2. Be sure to set it up appropriately following different tutorials on the blog.
  3. Create a directory called “translation” in your child theme folder
  4. Copy the PO and MO files that you have created into this folder
• Approach 2 – Main Theme
  You could alternatively copy your PO and MO file to the translation folder of “suffusion” itself, instead of using a child theme. If you are using this method:
  1. Note that theme upgrades will clean out the translation files that you have created
  2. If you want to avoid a disruption of service because of a theme upgrade, make use of a “Maintenance Mode” plugin to display a message that says “Under Maintenance” when you are upgrading the theme.

Whatever your approach, once you have your translation files you have to tell WP to use them. This is easy:

1. Open your wp-config.php file. This should be in the WordPress installation folder.
2. Check if there is a line that says:

   define ('WPLANG', 'fr_FR');

   Obviously, instead of “fr_FR” you would have your own language.

3. If you do have such a line, make sure that the language is correct as per the PO/MO files you created. If you don’t have this line, add it with the appropriate language code.

That’s it – you are done.

How to Use Translations – Advanced

Let’s say there is some standard text that you are not a fan of. For example you don’t like the fact that the theme says “Posted by …” and you would like to change it to the more grandiose “Posted by the awesome …” or the laconic “By …”.

For this you would make a copy of the en_US.po file and place it in the translation folder. You would then open the file in POEdit, then look for the string that says “Posted by” and change it to say what you want, then save the PO file and generate the MO file. That will make sure that your changed content is reflected on your site. Note that if you do this through a child theme, you are making sure that such changes are persisted through theme upgrades.

Keeping Up with Changes on Custom Translations

Let’s say you have build your own translation that is custom to you and you don’t want to share it with folks here. Now there is a new translation file in a new version of the theme, or in other words, the suffusion.po file has changed. How would you merge the changes between the new file and yours?

Another highly useful free tool such as WinMerge can help you do this fairly easily. You can download and install WinMerge, then open your PO file and the new suffusion.po file in adjacent panes. The program will show you several differences between the files, a lot of which are not relevant to you:

The above is a comparison of the core translation file and the Russian PO file. Obviously you don’t want it to report the line that says “msgstr …”, because that is the actual translation string, and that is something you WILL expect to be different. Seeing such lines highlighted in yellow will only increase the time you spend processing the file. So let’s filter these out:

1. In WinMerge go to Tools → Filters
2. You will see:
   
3. Go to the tab that says “Line Filters”. Make sure that “Enable Line Filters” is checked:
   
4. Click on “New”, then put in “msgstr”, then click “Save”. Select the resulting filter:
   
5. Click OK. You will see the filtered results:
    
   The resulting lines are shown as “different”, but are not caught when you actually try to merge differences (hence the different shade of yellow).

You can now go ahead and merge the differences one by one. It should take around 8 minutes to the practiced eye.

Once you have merged the differences, you can reopen the file in POEdit and translate the new strings.

Submitting Your Translation

If you have improved any of the translations above, or have created a new translation and you want to contribute that, please do the following:

1. Post on the Support Forum with the PO and MO files zipped and attached.
2. Drop in a line with your name and URL. I will credit you on this page above with a link to your name for that language.