How to change WordPress language?
Sometimes you need to change WordPress language for a fresh installation.
Surfing the Internet you can find lots of solutions, some of them are obsolete, others are very complicated.
In this tutorial we are going to explain how to change WordPress language in with a very easy and fast method. You don’t need to be a coder and you don’t need to install any plugin.
From Worpress 4 you can change the WordPress language through the interface (Settings -> General -> Site Language). If you have an earlier version maybe you need to update it for security reasons…
We suppose now we have an English version installed and we want to change the language to Italian.
The only thing we need to do is Settings -> General -> Site Language and select Italian from the combobox.
Easy right?
The problem is: what if I go on Site language settings and I have only English in my combobox?
Solution is very easy. You just need to follow these three steps:
1- Create a new folder in your ‘/wp-content’ directory called ‘/languages’
2- Copy in this folder the language pack of the language you want to install
Language pack for Italian is here: https://downloads.wordpress.org/translation/core/4.8.1/it_IT.zip
A list of the all translating teams is here: https://make.wordpress.org/polyglots/teams/
3– Now you will be able to select your language through the interface.
Just remember that ‘languages’ doesn’t need write permissions and you need to extract the archive before copying it tha language directory.
At https://make.wordpress.org/polyglots/teams/ you have a full list on languages.
Note that some translations teams have fully translated WordPress into their language, while others are not yet complete. You can find on this page tracks the progress of translation teams. Italian for example is 100% completed.
If you want to help in managing and validating translations you can get in touch with the existing language team.
Posted August 30, 2017
