Translate a WordPress site into English: theme, plugins and content

Which WordPress files to export

A WordPress site has two layers of text, and they come from different places.

• Theme and plugin strings: buttons, form labels, messages such as "Read more" or "No results found". They live in .pot (template) or .po (language) files, managed with Poedit or Loco Translate.
• Content: pages, posts, menus. If the site runs WPML, this content can be exported as XLIFF files.

Manuce handles both. One decision comes before any export: British English (en_GB) or American English (en_US). It sets the file name WordPress expects, for example mytheme-en_GB.po, and the spelling throughout: colour or color, organise or organize, basket or cart. A British theme next to an American contact-form plugin on the same page is easy to spot. Pick one variant and check every file against it.

What changes when the target is English

English is usually shorter than Romance languages such as French (around 10 to 15%), so menus and buttons rarely overflow. The traps lie elsewhere.

• Plural forms. English has two categories, one and other, and zero takes the plural: 0 comments. The .po header should read nplurals=2; plural=(n != 1);. A French source uses (n > 1), which would produce 0 comment; Polish or Russian sources have three forms that collapse to two. The English strings go in msgstr[0] ("%d comment") and msgstr[1] ("%d comments").
• Punctuation. No space before a colon or question mark, and English quotation marks replace « » or „ “: Error: required field.
• Heading case. A widget title may become Recent Posts (common in American usage) or Recent posts. Choose one style site-wide.
• Ambiguous words. Post is both a noun and a verb. The file's msgctxt contexts and translator comments help decide, and they are kept.
• Dates. Date format strings are not translated. j F Y gives 5 March 2025, the British order; American usage prefers F j, Y. Adjust these yourself.

What Manuce returns, and what it does not do

You get the same file, in the same format, ready to drop back into the project. Indentation, entry order, quotes, comments, line endings, encoding and BOM are preserved; only the values change. A theme's .pot comes back as an English .po.

Every translated value is compared with its source for placeholders and tags. "Publié le %1$s par %2$s" must become Posted on %1$s by %2$s, and <a href="%s">…</a> must keep its tag and its %s. If a mismatch persists, the source value is kept and the report says so.

Not translated: keys, empty values, URLs, email addresses, numbers, colours (#1a73e8), date formats, identifiers and anything marked as non-translatable. The report lists translated strings and those left as they were, with the reason. Pricing counts the words in the values, excluding keys and tags.

What Manuce does not do: it does not compile the .mo (Poedit or Loco Translate do that), import anything into your site, translate page URLs or touch content you have not exported. It does not provide sworn or certified translation, should your legal notice or terms need it.

Preparing the files and checking before go-live

Before uploading:

• Regenerate the .pot from the current version of the theme or plugin so that recently added strings are included.
• If you start from an existing .po in your source language rather than the .pot, plan to switch its language header and plural rule to English in Poedit or Loco Translate.
• Mark brand and product names that must stay unchanged as non-translatable.
• Use the free sample to judge the tone, for instance on your contact-form messages.

Once the files are back:

• Store translations where updates will not overwrite them, such as wp-content/languages/themes/ or wp-content/languages/plugins/, rather than inside the theme folder.
• Test plurals with 0, 1 and 2 items: comments, search results, basket contents.
• Read dates, buttons and error messages on live pages, not only in the translation editor.
• Go through each string the report lists as left in the source language.

In practice

1. Choose British (en_GB) or American (en_US) English, then export the theme and plugin .pot or .po files and the WPML content as XLIFF.
2. Upload the files to Manuce and review the quote and the free sample.
3. Download the translated files and the string report.
4. Compile the .po files to .mo in Poedit or Loco Translate and re-import the XLIFF into WPML.
5. Check the English site: plurals, dates, buttons and any strings flagged in the report.