Translating WooCommerce Subscriptions – Troubleshooting Translation Issues

Like other extensions sold on WooCommerce.com, WooCommerce Subscriptions is translation ready and includes some bundled translations. There are more languages available via your site’s dashboard.

However, in some cases you may find the translations may not be working, or you need to put your own in place. Here we offer some tips to help make your translation of WooCommerce Subscriptions a success.

There are several translations of WooCommerce Subscriptions available that can be added to your site for use. For any of these languages, adding and updating a the available translation can be done by:

1. Installing the WooCommerce Subscriptions extension on your site.
2. Changing the language of your site to one with an available translation at Settings > General
3. Navigating to Dashboard > Updates in your site’s admin area.
4. Scrolling to the bottom of the page, and selecting to “Update Translations” under the Translations heading.

If one is available, you’ll see that a translation has been successfully updated for WooCommerce Subscriptions. Now your site will translate WooCommerce Subscriptions when the site is set to that language.

Why does translation not work? 

If your translation was working before, but isn’t anymore, it’s possible that a plugin update overwrote your translations!

To avoid this happening, If you are using your own translation (i.e. a custom .mo file), you can include the translation files in either:

• A languages folder within the Woo Subscriptions plugin’s folder, e.g. /wp-content/plugins/woocommerce-subscriptions/languages/woocommerce-subscriptions-en_AU.mo
• Within the default WordPress languages folder e.g. /wp-content/languages/plugins/woocommerce-subscriptions-en_AU.mo.

The second of these options helps make your translation upgrade safe by preventing your language files from being deleted each time you upgrade the plugin.

If you are not using your own languages files, WPML or Loco Translate can be used to manage translations instead. See our documentation on translating WooCommerce for more information.

If you are using Loco Translate to manage your translations, and translations aren’t showing on the live site, make sure that you’ve pressed “Sync” to sync the translations . You may also need to clear your browser cache and the Subscriptions cache in WooCommerce > Status > Tools. Loco Translate also has some helpful FAQs available about translating WooCommerce if you run into issues.

Why can’t I find the string that I want to translate? 

If you’re having trouble finding a string to translate, it may be because some strings use placeholders such as %1$s every %2$s. If you are searching for a phrase or sentence that can change depending on the way your subscription product is configured, that’s a good clue that there will be placeholder strings. If you can’t find the exact phrase that you want to translate, search for keywords/phrases instead of the exact phrase.

For Loco Translate, you may also need to press “Sync” to update the strings from the template after updating Woo Subscriptions.