To translate your website, the best way is to use poedit. WordPress uses dedicated language files to store translations of your site’s content (or strings of text) in other languages. Those files come in two formats:
- Portable Object (PO) files: You need a unique PO file for each language you add to your site, and includes manual translations.
- Machine Object (MO) files: These translation files are machine-readable (i.e. they can be read by WordPress) and are generated from PO files.
Usually, the WordPress translation process starts with a PO file for each language you want to add. This file includes every single translated string.
When you see plugins and themes with “ready for translation”, it means that they include a POT (Portable Object Template) file. This file includes all the strings of the plugin or theme in a format that is easy to read and translate into individual PO files.
Poedit lets you edit the PO files and compile MO files. Using Poedit to translate your WordPress themes and plugins is remarkably simple once you’ve installed the tool. The free version of Poedit is more than enough.
Here are the articles to follow to translate completely your website:
In case you made a community website, you might need these two articles: