Question

When using gettext in WordPress to create a bilingual theme, do we have to create one .php file for every page twice (English, French)? For example, header.php, header-fr.php, sidebar.php, sidebar-fr.php, taxonomy-types.php, taxonomy-types-fr.php, etc. Sidebar-fr.php would then use _e(‘Text to translate’, ‘domain’). Is there a way to simply keep one copy of all php files and to switch the locale?

Thank you.

Answer 1

Create languages folder inside the theme directory, that’s where you save language files, e.g. ar.po (for Arabic).
When writing strings in the code use the following (I usually use English text as the default text, so I won’t need to create extra language file, and for each other language create files):

<?php echo __('This is a test','my_theme_name'); ?>
<?php _e('This is a test','my_theme_name'); ?>

in functions.php in the theme folder add the following code to load the language file (please note my_theme_name as given above):

add_action( 'after_setup_theme', 'my_theme_setup' );
function my_theme_setup(){

    load_theme_textdomain('my_theme_name', get_template_directory() . '/languages');

}

This way you create only one file(header.php, index.php, etc), where strings are easy to translate.

[Note: this answer assumes that you have knowledge in how to create gettext translation files]