FAQ

WPML includes its own automatic update and install process. After you install the base WPML plugin once, you can auto-install its components and receive upgrades directly to the WordPress admin. First time WPML installation The first time you use WPML, you need to manually download it and install. Then, register to receive automated updates to […]

Things that you can check when getting an error message like this: Do you have a working internet connection? Can the webserver access that host specified in the error message (api.wpml.org) via http (you may want to check this with your web server administrator or host provider. If your server has problems resolving the api.wpml.org […]

Lucky for us, WordPress has anticipated situations where things don’t quite go as planned and included debug facilities which will show you what the problem is. Have a look at the debugging WPML page to see how to activate the different debug resources and where to report problems.

Every plugin that you add to your WordPress site will add execution time and database queries. In this tutorial, we explain how to check where execution time comes from. With this information, you and WPML support team can find bottlenecks and improve your site’s performance. Install and activate the Debug Objects plugin We will use […]

In order for String Translation to work, your theme (and plugins) must pass texts through translation calls. See this FAQ for how to wrap texts in GetText calls, so that WPML can translate them.

You should not bundle WPML with any theme, free or commercial. WPML comes with GPL license, but is also trademarked. In practice, removing all the trademarked material from WPML would be a huge project and is really not recommended. We understand that theme authors want to provide a complete package for multilingual sites for their […]

The short answer is, no. WPML doesn’t include a built-in interface to machine translation. WPML is a tool that lets you translate your site and include multilingual content. It also includes an interface to translation services. From our understanding of how Google treats machine translation, we believe that Google will very much not appreciate seeing […]

A 500 error means that there is an error in the PHP code that your site runs. When errors are not caught, the server stops everything and returns page that says “500 error”. Different servers are configured to display these 500 errors slightly differently, but they all mean the same – there is an unhanded […]

You can use WPML on as many sites as you like, for whatever use and even modify the code. WPML is licensed under GPL. This means that you are free to do whatever you want with the code.  

First, thank you again for buying WPML from us. We’ve made it easy for you to get a tax receipt, with everything needed for your accounting. Log in to your WPML account and click on the link saying ‘My Account‘. Fill-in the text field where it says ‘Company’. This information will show in your tax […]

When you activate WPML, it adds language attributes to all existing content. If the activation process is interrupted, some content may be missing because it has no language. Read this FAQ for instructions on how to repeat the initialization process and get all your content to show again.

In order to expedite handling your support requests, you can give to the WPML support team debug information from your site. This information includes general info about the server configuration, installed versions of WordPress, plugins and the theme. None of this information is private and does not include any data that may be used to […]

Some plugins use a special configuration file in order to be fully compatible with WPML. For many plugins, this configuration is stored on a WPML repository and the file is retrieved when the new plugin is activated. In case caching issues prevent this from happening you can run this manually. Go to Dashboard -> Updates. Scroll […]

If your widgets include translatable strings, you’ll be able to edit the translation with WPML, but translations are not guaranteed to display on the site. Method 1) Using WordPress’ filters WPML uses the standard WordPress filters and translates content that you filter. All the standard WordPress widgets apply filters by default. When you create your […]

WPML can serve different languages from different domains or sub-domains. For this to work, some setup is required in your web server. We’ll start with the theory of how it works, so that you understand how to set it up on your own server. When a request comes in, this is what happens: The DNS […]

To make custom types in WordPress multilingual, your custom types need to be declared according to the recommended WordPress procedure: Make sure they’re registered on the ‘init‘ hook Never use a GetText call for the custom post type Always use the constants TRUE and FALSE. 0 and 1 may not work. Check the WordPress Codex […]

If your site shows question marks for non-English characters, most chances are your database character encoding is different than UTF-8. If you’re using PHPMyAdmin, the structure of your wp_posts table should look like this: If you see a different value for the collation, it means that the character encoding is wrong. This will cause text […]

If you can’t get past the language configuration wizard, there’s probably something wrong between WPML, your theme and other plugins. This FAQ will help you identify these problems, so that we can find a solution and get you going. 1. Enable a PHP debug file When you activate WPML, it creates language tables in your […]

Important update for string languages, since WPML 3.3 Since WPML 3.3, you can translate strings from any language to any other language. You can assign the source language to specific strings or to entire string contexts. Until WPML 3.3, you could only translate strings from English to other languages. If you are running a site […]

Many themes are already multilingual-ready. Read this FAQ for common pitfalls and how you can avoid them when creating new WordPress themes.

When you enable languages in directories, you’re telling WPML to arrange translations in what appears like different virtual directories. For example: www.example.com www.example.com/es/ www.example.com/ja/ For this to work, Apache’s rewrite module must be enabled and the site needs to use a ‘fancy’ permalink structure (e.g., anything different than the default permalinks). Then, go to WPML->Languages […]

If your translated pages appear slower than the original pages, there are a few things you can do. First, be sure to check where problems are coming from. You can learn how to use Debug Objects plugin and identify performance issues in our FAQ on debugging performance problems. When you see an unexpectedly large number […]

WPML has two features which are great for translating, but make everything work slow – just for you (not for visitors). You can disable them. Go to WPML->String Translation. The first thing is: “Track where string appear on the site” With this, WPML keeps record of the PHP and HTML that called strings in the […]

Many themes and plugins save texts in the wp_options table. WPML makes them translatable via the String Translation module. Let’s start at the end. Supposing that your code has something like: <?php echo(get_option(“footer_text”)) ?> To translate this text, you don’t need to edit anything in the code. You need to enable WPML’s String Translation module […]

When you use Safari browser on an Apple computer and download WPML and its add-on plugins’ .zip files, Safari will automatically unzip them. This happens due to Safari’s default behavior. To solve this issue you can either disable this option in Safari or try using a different browser to download WPML and its add-on plugins. To disable […]