Unfortunately, not all theme designers take language issues into consideration. See:
http://codex.wordpress.org/WordPress_in_Your_Language
Not sure…. but wordpad may not be ideal as far as using in a translative effort. Perhaps download a more “vanilla” text editor, such as notepad2 or notepad +?
Yeah, Wordpad isn’t a “plain” text editor, it (can) save control characters in your documents.
In addition, I guess you need to use the “HTML” versions” of the Greek letters.
http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/sgml/entities.html
It has to do with character encoding. And if you’re using Greek, you really need to read up on that. The best thing would be if everyone would use Unicode (UTF-8) but because they don’t we have problems… At least WordPress is trying to do the right thing.
You will also need to use a good editor, and WordPad definitely is not one. If you have to work on Windows, I can recommend a simple free editor called Notepad2 (Google will help you find it).
And indeed, as Lorelle said, not all theme developers take internationalisation into consideration. Even the default WP theme is lacking in this respect. (Hint for the next release, guys!)
When I was developing themes I took care to avoid hardcoded English, though unfortunately that’s not possible with my generic templates. It’s too bad that other designers can’t do the same. That said, I did find information about internationalising themes really hard to come by and was never (for example) able to find out whether I needed to produce a separate file with all the translatable strings, or how to make such a file.
What we really need, of course, is some kind of quality-controlled list of themes guaranteed to work in multiple languages, contain all plugin hooks, work in all major browsers and validate as xhtml and css. (I’m not for a moment suggesting that all themes should have to conform to this standard to be listed at the codex or other repositories. That would be kind of fascist. But there is, I think, a role for a reliable list of stuff that won’t break.) Unfortunately, the sheer number of themes and the time and effort that would be required to check them all makes this a pipe dream.
Thread Starter
spiros
(@spiros)
Thanks guys! Yes, using Notepad2 and saving as UTF did the trick (although I did the same thing in Wordpad which did not work!).
Another point is, as you say, I ‘ve been searching high and low and I still cannot find clear and detailed instructions on how to change a non-localizable theme to localizable one. I mean the full procedure, not just replacing the hardcoded strings with _e($message) . Do the instructions in http://codex.wordpress.org/Translating_WordPress apply? Why isn’t it possible for the themes to get their translations from a single language file rather than creating a new one?
Another point is that what should one do when there is a mo file for the localized theme and the main language mo file? I notice that some strings are common in these, and despite of that this is not enough for the theme (even a localizable one) to derive them from the main language file.
At certain point of the development (I think it was around 1.5.1 or later) a decision was made to separate the localization of the themes – even of the Default theme – and of WP.
As you can see here http://svn.automattic.com/wordpress-i18n/pot/trunk/ different POT files for WP and the default theme were created. The translation of the theme should follow the same logic as the translation of WP > save the .pot file, create .po and translate; > compile .mo file from it.
The best instructions (or maybe the only one!) about how to go about localizing themes I’ve on Ryan’s blog:
http://boren.nu/archives/2004/11/01/localizing-plugins-and-themes/
A post on Ryan’s blog back when 1.5 was still firmly in beta is not exactly the most obvious place to find information. I wonder why none of this stuff is on codex? Maybe the localization team assumed that any non-English speakers would just use Kubrick, or that it was asking too much of theme developers to get to grips with the translation process.
Thanks for the info anyway; I wish someone had been able to point me to an example .pot file back when I was doing themes. Hopefully somebody else will find it useful.
That is a nice section of the Codex, there is ample information to start with.
Unfortunately, as it is every time when volunteers do the job, the lack of real dedication, patience, organization or whatever may put to a halt the project. I, too cannot find up-to-date material in the Codex for my language. To tell the truth, nothing at all.
Though, there are several translation in use, originating from several people. Now, I am trying to persuade one of them to work for the Codex and perhaps later, I will contribute, too.
But I do advice against issuing pieces in other language than English. It is just a pain to have something good and not able to understand a word of it.
