How to make your WordPress site have Chinese as the user front-end language but English as the admin backend language?
Recently we were asked the above question, and thought we’d make a tutorial here as the job can be DIY’ed to some extend by a site manager who is not necessarily a web designer/developer.
Scenario:
You are a native English speaker and have set up a WordPress blog/website. However, you want to publish Chinese language articles on the site and your main target audience are going to be reading Chinese.
Sure, delivering content in Chinese is not a big problem for you if you have got someone to translate your articles into Chinese. Your problem is that all of the WordPress default words and phrases are still in English. Although your audience have no problem reading your articles, some of them who don’t know any English will have a problem navigating around or interacting with your site due to the scattered English here and there.
You want your site audience to see everything in Chinese, but as the site manager, you still want to keep the back-end of your site to be in English so you can manage and administer the site as normal.
Solution:
In this tutorial, I’m going to show you how to solve this problem by using a WordPress plugin called “One Backend Language“.
The solution essentially consists of three parts:
- Localize your core WordPress installation into Chinese.
- Localize your WordPress Theme into Chinese.
- Install the “One Backend Language” plugin and set the back-end language to be English.
Ok Let’s get started.
Step 1
Download a Chinese WordPress installation zip file from the WordPress China official website.
If your WordPress English installation is, for example, version 3.1.1, then you need to download a corresponding Chinese 3.1.1 installation. For security reasons, it’s good practice to keep all of your WordPress installations up to date.
Step 2
Unpack the downloaded zip file. You should see a folder called “languages” inside of the “wp-content” folder. The “languages” folder contains all the files for localizing the English WordPress core installation into Chinese.
Upload the “languages” folder using an FTP program to your server.
The path is: Your English WordPress installation > wp-content > languages
Step 3
Now you have put the core WordPress installation’s localization files in place, you need to put the WordPress Theme’s localization files in place.
If you are using WordPress’ native Themes – Twenty Ten or Twenty Eleven, you can find the Theme localization files inside of the zip file you’ve just downloaded and unpacked.
Here I’m going to use the Twenty Ten Theme as an example. You should see a folder called “languages” inside of the “twentyten” folder.
The path is : wp-content > themes > twentyten> languages.
Again, you need to upload this”languages” folder to your server following the same path: wp-content > themes > twentyten > languages.
Now on your server, the two “languages” folders are in place as shown on the figure below:
Step 4
Log in to your WordPress’s back-end and install the “One Backend Language” plugin. Activate the plugin and make sure that English is the default language for the back-end.
Step 5
Find a file called “wp-config.php” on the server, which is inside of your WordPress installation. You need to edit the file directly on the server.
Open “wp-config.php” and search for: define('WPLANG', ' ')
define('WPLANG', ' ');
Change it into:
define('WPLANG', 'zh_CN');
Save the file and you will see the front-end of your site is now truly Chinese and the back-end is still in English.
Conclusion:
If you are using a customized WordPress Theme, you probably need to find a bilingual Theme Designer/Developer to localize the theme into Chinese for you, which I’m not going to cover in this tutorial as it’s a considerably more complicated task, and modifying these files without knowledge of how they work could damage your website.
If you are using a free WordPress Theme such as “Suffusion“ which has already been localized into Chinese, you can just download the Chinese language files and upload to the theme folder on the server. For the “Suffusion” Theme, you can download the language files from it’s official website.
Some third party WordPress Plugins might need to be localized, if it displays words and phrases on the front-end of the site. In this case you might want to seek help from a Theme Designer/Developer.
We hope you find this tutorial useful. If you have any feedback or questions please leave a comment.
Outstanding information!
Thanks very much guys, a big help to me.
xx
You are welcome, Shanghai Alien.
Glad you find it useful!
Thank you for the nice information its usefull. Do you know how to have 2 languange like (english | chinese) in one wordpress theme?
Hi Ellah, there is a WordPress plugin called “WordPress Multilingual Plugin” which you can use to quickly achieve this. Alternatively though you could consider two linked WordPress installations – one in English and one in Chinese. This approach would mean more admin work, but gives you more control and flexibility. Because you have separate control of the two installations, you can apply different customisations/plugins, and show/hide certain content according to the audience’s language/cultural requirements.
Also, you might want to check out this article on the netmagazine website – http://www.netmagazine.com/tutorials/build-multilingual-site-wordpress
Hope that helps.