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How to Translate Shift

There are English phrases throughout Shift. This tutorial will show you how to translate these phrases to another language.

  1. Download Poedit
  2. Download a copy of Shift from wordpress.org
  3. Unzip the shift.zip file you just downloaded
  4. In the unzipped "shift" folder, locate the "shift.pot" file in the languages folder
  5. Open Poedit, click the Create new translation option, and select the shift.pot file

Once you have the shift.pot file opened in Poedit, you can navigate through the English phrases in the theme, and translate them one-by-one.

How to Create the Translation Files

You can translate as much or as little as you'd like. When you are finished translating, follow these steps to export your translation files from Poedit:

  1. Open the File menu
  2. Select the Save option to create the .po file
  3. Reopen the File menu
  4. Select the Complile to MO option to create the .mo file

At this point, you now have the .po and .mo files that WordPress needs to use your translation.

How to Add the Translations to Your Site

The final step is to add these files to your server, and they will automatically take affect on your site. To upload them to your server:

  1. Connect to your server via FTP
  2. Locate the languages folder (wordpress/wp-content/themes/shift/languages)
  3. Upload both the ".po" and ".mo" files

The translations should now take affect on your site.

Please consider emailing us your translations. If you send the ".po" and ".mo" files to , we will include them in Shift. This means you won't need to upload them every time you update Shift, and other users around the world will be able to benefit from your translation.

Common Questions

My translation aren't working. What's wrong?

If your translation files aren't working, first double-check that they have been uploaded to the languages folder in the shift folder on your server.

Next, make sure you have set your language via the Site Language option in the Settings menu.

If the translation still isn't working then the names of your .mo and .po files are likely not in a supported dialect.

For example, Poedit will allow you to translate in the Ecuadorian Spanish dialect, and your files will be exported as es_EC.po and es_EC.mo. However, WordPress does not currently support this dialect. You can find a full list of the supported languages and locale codes here: https://make.wordpress.org/polyglots/teams/

To get your translation working right away, switch the filenames to match a similar, supported dialect (es_EC.po => es_ES.po).

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