Change the language of your WordPress blog in 3 simple steps

I recently updated the site of my tax preparation business, as part of the re-design I was required to change the language used in the blog to Spanish. After searching in Google and trying a few WordPress plug-ins unsuccessfully, I ended up doing the following which surprisingly enough it worked out very well.

Step 1

Download the language files for the language you would like to translate your blog to. You will need to download two files, one with the extension .mo and the other one with the extension .po. The files are named using the two digit language code_two digit country code. For the Spanish file I needed I downloaded these files:

• es_ES.mo
• es_ES.po

These files can be downloaded from this site, just look for the folder labeled using the same format, language code _ country code:

http://svn.automattic.com/wordpress-i18n/

The exact url for the files I downloaded is this:

http://svn.automattic.com/wordpress-i18n/es_ES/tags/3.3/messages/

Step 2

Save the files mentioned above to wp-contentlanguages. If the folder languages does not exists, just create it.

Step 3

Open the wp-config.php file using a text editor, look for the following string “define(‘WPLANG’, ”);” and update it by adding the language file you downloaded. For example, in my case I updated this line to the following:

define('WPLANG','es_ES');

That is all, I hope this is useful for you and if you have any comments or better ways to localize a WordPress blog please let us know in the comment’s section.