WordPress Theme French Language Translation

Comment on WordPress Language Translation by SEO Dave.

Adding language support to Stallion is on the list of things to look into, I’ve had a quick look into adding language support and looks like it’s a real pain to manage since the pot and mo files (language files) are based on line numbers: so if you take a Stallion template file like comments.php, find English text that’s shown in a browser like

This post is password protected. Enter the password to view comments

Which is on line 9.

As I understand it you add this text and info to an English language file and create other language files like French to convert the text.

Problem with this approach is updates, if I change the above English text or the line number changes all the language files need updating. Fine for a few sentences, but Stallion has a LOT of text, especially on the options pages and I’m fluent in one language, so wouldn’t be able to edit a Chinese language file to take into account updates!

I’ve been thinking about tackling this another way, replace the text with an option and have it on a Stallion Language options page where the user can add anything they like in any language. As long as all text that is visible to the end user is covered it wouldn’t be too difficult to create specific language based default options sets (like you see on the main Stallion Options page for my defaults and my SEO defaults) which would be a heck of a lot easier to maintain than the current language translations theme and plugin developers use.

If I try this it will start with what our visitors see not what’s on the Stallion options pages etc… generate (way too much text to translate). Not perfect for those who don’t read English, but if stage one works who knows.

Anyway, right now I’m afraid it would be a case of editing the template files manually to how you want them. I’m working on the Stallion 6.3 update and it’s a BIG update so I wouldn’t start it yet since you’d have to start it again after the update.

I might give the language translation options page a try for this update as ignoring the language translation possibilities would be great to be able to change the English text for some sites.

With regard the searchable text you don’t see on page related to images.

You have two options and one is greyhat SEO.

SEO safe is use alt text, put the text in the alt attribute for the image. Not only is this SEO safe, search engines like Google use the alt text for ranking purposes. It’s also searchable via the WordPress search facility.

Greyhat SEO use noscript. Noscript is for when information is hidden behind say javascript or flash and you add the text in noscript tags. For visitors with javascript turned off see the noscript tags, not checked if WordPress search facility reads noscript, I would assume it does. Problem with noscript is it’s abused by blackhat SEO’s, perfect place for stuffing keywords, so if you use it inappropriately you could get a penalty. Since alt text is designed for what you want to achieve it’s SEO greyhat to use noscript unless you have a really good reason for using it like a LOT of text and even then it’s pushing it.

David

Update: Added a much easier language translation feature to Stallion, anyone can fully translate Stallion to another language.