Polylang

Polylang offers multilingual support for BirdPress. See the Polylang website for more details and documentation.

Get Started

Initial Plugin Set-up

The web team will get the Polylang plugin set up.

• Activate the Polylang plugin
• Enter the license key
• Select the default and secondary language(s)
• Finish the rest of the set-up
• Select the following under URL modifications:
  • The language is set from the directory name in pretty permalinks
  • Hide URL language information for default language
  • The front page URL contains the language code instead of the page name or page id
• Optional: Activate Media in language settings

Menus

Set up the Language Switcher Menu:

• Go to Appearance > Menus
• Select the Polylang Language Switcher menu
  • If one does not exist, create a new menu called Polylang Language Switcher
• Under Add menu items, open Language Switcher
• Select the checkbox next to Languages and add click Add to menu
• In the menu, open the Languages menu dropdown and check the following:
  • Displays as dropdown
  • Check Displays language names if it is unchecked
• Assign this menu to the Polylang Language Switcher Display location for every language
• Press the Save Menu button

If you have an accompanying tinybar menu (Contact, eNews, Donate):

• Select the Tinybar Menu in the menu dropdown
• Add the appropriate pages to the menu
• If there is a donate link, add the donate class to the CSS classes textbox
  • If the textbox is not available, scroll to the top of the screen and select Screen Options
  • Enable CSS Classes under Show advanced menu properties
• Assign it to the Tinybar Navigation Display location; you will need to create one for each language

All other menus (Primary, footer, contact) will need to be recreated with every language’s pages and assigned to their corresponding language.

String Translation

The Strings Translation table enables you to translate text that is hard-coded into the template. By default, all text will be in English.

• Go to Languages > Strings translations
• Update the string name labeled blogname to your page title’s translation (the String will be the title of your website)
• Next to Filter, select BirdPress and press Filter
• Translate the strings in each language
• Be sure to click the Save Changes button when you are finished
• You can also translate the dates, widget titles and URL slugs

We are keeping a list of translations as teams create them for strings and other plugins. See the BirdPress 2.0 Translation Master for available translations. The web team can import a file for your site if translation strings already exist for the language.

The following strings are available for translation under the BirdPress group filter:

Multilingual pages

Every page in the website will need to be re-created in every language. It is recommended to first lay them out in the default language, then copy the blocks from one page to the other and translate.

For more on translating pages, see the Polylang documentation.