Professional WordPress® Plugin Development

Chapter 5. Internationalization

WHAT'S IN THIS CHAPTER?

• Understanding the description of internationalization and localization

• Determining the benefits of internationalizing plugins

• Preparing plugins for translation

• Using the WordPress internationalization functions

• Internationalizing JavaScript

• Using translation tools

Internationalization is the act of preparing your plugin for use in any number of languages. WordPress uses U.S. English as its default language, but it has a large community of users who don't read and write in English. This community pulls together to create translations of WordPress in languages used all around the world.

One of the goals of WordPress is to make it easy for people across the world to publish content. As a plugin developer, you can help democratize the publishing process for users of many different cultures. WordPress makes this easy for developers, so there are no development hurdles to cross when internationalizing your plugins.

INTERNATIONALIZATION AND LOCALIZATION

Using the built-in translation functions in WordPress, you can easily make your plugin available to a wide variety of people without any knowledge of your users' written languages. The process of translation is handled for you by WordPress if you follow a few simple steps during the development process.

Internationalization deals with making sure strings of text are wrapped in specific function calls. It is the practice of making text ready for localization. The shorthand term for internationalization ...