The quick and dirty way to change a few phrases is to install a plugin such as the “Say what?” plugin (edit via tools > text changes, with domain “customizr”).
However, you’ll find yourself forever adding phrases if you really need your site to be multilingual. The official, correct (and ultimately simplest, but it doesn’t feel that way at first) way to deal with is languages in WordPress is to:
- Edit your wp-config file and change the line
define('WPLANG', '');
to define('WPLANG', 'it_IT');
(in this case Italian; you change to whatever your ISO language code is). This will tell WordPress to translate all phrases like “E-mail”, “reply to this comment” etc. into your language. The language files are very comprehensive in WordPress, with 83 languages currently defined.
- If your language is one already also supported by Customizr (ar, es, de, fr, hu, it, nl, pl, br, ro, ru, se, tr, cn), then you will already have a language file set up in the /lang subdirectory of Customizr. Customizr will automatically pick up your WordPress language setting and use it. This will give you automatic translation of phrases like “Read more”, “Sorry, but nothing matched your search criteria”, etc (which are defined in Customizr, not in WordPress).
- If your language is not supported yet by Customizr, then you need to:
- Locate the default.po file in
wp-content\themes\customizr\lang
folder and download it to your computer.
- Download Poedit
- Open the default.po file and start translating the strings (or just the strings you care about). Be careful not to insert special characters without using the tricks to make them acceptable (follow the English example). E.g. “featured image” becomes \”featured image\” in Poedit.
- Save the file with your iso code (e.g. zh_TW.po or da_DK etc).
- Once you’ve finished, if you’ve translated all the phrases, then send the .po and .mo file (the latter gets saved automatically at the same time that you save the .po file) to Nikeo via the contact form on https://www.themesandco.com and he’ll insert it in the theme. In the meantime, place it in your
wp-content\themes\customizr\lang
folder where it will start translating for you.
Last but not least, if you’re creating a site in another language, but you prefer to work in English (say), then you can use plugins such as “Admin in English” to put the admin panels back into English. Alternatively, if you are using qTranslate, you can select your preferred admin-panel language in the sidebar of the dashboard.