Do you speak another language than English? Are you willing to translate UpdraftPlus into your language?

You will benefit other speakers of your language, by providing them with easier access to WordPress’s #1 most installed backup/restore plugin
If you are the main translator for a language and include the phrases from our add-ons in your translation, then we’ll give you free vouchers for UpdraftPlus Premium upon completion of the translation.

If you are ready to start, then here’s what to do:

1. Check that no existing translation exists

If you’re using WordPress in your local language, but UpdraftPlus is still showing in English, then no translation yet exists in the stable version. However, possibly someone else has already started work. Contact us using the contact form below to check (and if one has already started, you can share the work-load and finish the job quicker).

2. Start translating UpdraftPlus!

When you email us, we will give you a username and login for our translation system. It is web-based. All you need to do is click on the phrase and translate, and then type in a translation.

Just one thing you need to know; where you see %s or %d, it is a place-holder. You must include the place-holder in your output.

e.g. in this phrase:

You have %d backups

When displayed in UpdraftPlus, that may appear as “You have 10 backups”, “You have 29 backups”, etc. If you were translating into French, you would translate as:

Tu disposes de %s sauvegardes

Or in Swahili:

Una backups %s

etc.

That’s all! Once you’ve translated all the available phrases, please using the contact form below again to let us know – and then we can import it into UpdraftPlus.

Alternative method: off-line translation

If you don’t want to translate through a web browser, and instead prefer to do it on your computer (e.g., your Internet connection is bad), then here is how. Instead of step 2. above, do this:

2. Install and run POEdit, or some other translation program

If you are an experienced translator, then you probably already have your preferred tools. If you are a beginner, then one easy-to-use tool is POEdit, which is freely available for Windows, Mac and Linux from POEdit.Net.

3. Load the file of phrases to be translated into POEdit / your editor

POEdit (or whatever you are using) will need to load the following file (the “POT” file):

a) Go to https://plugins.svn.wordpress.org/updraftplus/trunk/languages/

b) Download the file “updraftplus.pot” from that web-page into your computer

c) Then load it into POEdit / your editor. In POEdit, this means pressing “File” and then “Open”, and then choosing the file from wherever you saved it to in b).

Download the updraftplus.pot file

4. Edit the phrases

Now it’s time for the hard work – translating the phrases (also known as “strings”). Your editor will show you each of the phrases, and allow you to type in a new translation. If a phrase contains something like %s, then it is a place-holder – you should make sure that your translation contains the place-holder too, in the relevant place. (e.g. In English “There are %s days until Christmas” would be translated into French as “Il y a %s jours jusqu’à Noël”).

5. Set your language and save the file

Finally, your editor should allow you to indicate which language you are translating in to. Do this, and then save the resulting file. Share it via Dropbox (or something of the same sort) and send it to us using the contact form below (or attach it to an email in reply to our message to you approving the translation). It should be a filename ending in .po or .pot. Your editor may also create a file ending in .mo – you can send this too. (If you are a sufficiently skilled user, you can test your work by copying the .mo and .po file s into your WordPress installation in the directory wp-content/plugins/updraftplus/languages. The filename should have the name updraftplus-(locale).mo, replacing (locale) with the relevant language string (e.g. fr_FR for French as spoken in France, or ja for Japanese).

Editing the translation details in POEdit

That’s all!

Translating UpdraftPlus (internationalisation / localisation)