Translate Plugin From Child Theme

Marius Vetrici PhD
CEO wpriders
Date
July 2, 2015

Ever needed to translate some strings from a plugin so as to be able to further upgrade the main plugin without loosing your translations?

I did.

This is because there some languages around for which there are no default translations in plugins like WooCommerce Social Login or WooCommerce Bookings.

Unfortunately there’s no standard way to do that (at least I found none), but after some debugging inside WordPress here’s a solution that I would like to share with you:
In order to use this, follow these steps:

  1. Find the text domain of your plugin (look in plugin source code)
  2. Create a /translations folder inside your Theme
  3. Copy the .po file of your plugin to the /translations folder
  4. Rename the .po file and give it the following name: {text_domain}-{locale}.po For example: woocommerce-social-login-ro_RO.po (where woocommerce-social-login is the text domain and ro_RO is the desired locale)
  5. Compile .po file to .mo using a tool like PoEdit That’s it.

Optionally

In case you want to remove from your .po file (in your /translations folder) the untranslated strings so as to only leave there the one that you translated, feel free to use msgattrib gettext tool:

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