Easy Translator

Easy Translator is a plugin to translate your blog posts and pages. It provides a customizable widget to enable machine translation (from Google or Microsoft).

Easy Translator also provides a tool for plugin authors and translators. This tool picks up translatable strings (in _[_e]() functions) and presents them and their existing translations (from the MO object of the current text-domain, if loaded) in a user editable form. It can generate a valid PO file that can be emailed to the plugin author.

The Pro Version adds the following features:

  1. Color-pickers for the blog post translation widget, to customize and match your colors with your theme.
  2. Machine translation help to seed your plugin translation efforts. That is, for each translatable string found, it will give you a translation as provided by Google, which you can edit and perfect.
  3. Auto identification of the text-domain used by the plugin being translated.
  4. Email support so that your translators can send the PO file directly from the its window, streamlining their work.

If you are a plugin author interested in internationalizing your plugins, you may want to ask your potential translators to install Easy Translator to make it a snap to give you translations. If you want to clean up your internationalization, you will appreciate Easy Translator because it does a fuzzy string matching to highlight possible repetitions and conflicts among key strings.

Installation

Searching

The easiest way to install this plugin is to use the WordPress Admin interface. Go to your admin dashboard, find the "Plugins" menu, and click on "Add New". Search for this plugin and click on "Install Now" and follow the WordPress instructions.

Uploading

If you want to download it and manually install, you can again use the WordPress dashboard interface. First download the plugin zip file to your local computer. Then go to your admin dashboard, find the "Plugins" menu, and click on "Add New". After clicking on the "Add New" menu item as above, click on "Upload" (below the title "Install Plugins" near the top). Browse for your downloaded zip file, upload it and activate the plugin.

FTP

  1. Upload the Easy Translator plugin (the whole easy-translator folder) to the '/wp-content/plugins/' directory.
  2. Activate the plugin through the 'Plugins' menu in WordPress.
  3. Go to the Tools -> Easy Translator to use it.

To install the professional version of the plugin, please deactivage the Lite version (if any) first. Then upload the zip file that you download after your purchase using the WordPress admin interface shown below.

[install]

The plugin is updated also by following the same process, preferably from the plugin Admin page where you will see a file-upload form when an update is ready. The first update for your purchased plugin is always free.

Screenshots

  1. Blog page translation - Google widget  Screenshot [easy-translator] 1
  2. Blog page translation - Microsoft widget  Screenshot [easy-translator] 2
  3. Widget customization  Screenshot [easy-translator] 3
  4. How to use the plugin translator - The Editor  Screenshot [easy-translator] 4
  5. The POT File Viewer in the plugin translator.  Screenshot [easy-translator] 5

Change Log

  • V4.90: Compatibility with WP4.8. Sunset edition. [Aug 1, 2017]
  • V4.80: Compatibility with WordPress 4.5. [May 12, 2015]
  • V4.71: Minor interface and documentation changes. [Feb 25, 2016]
  • V4.70: Deprecating translation interface in favor of Google translation. [Feb 23, 2016]
  • V4.60: Compatibility with WordPress 4.4. [Dec 5, 2015]
  • V4.53: Refactoring changes. [Nov 7, 2015]
  • V4.52: Enhancements in the admin interface. [Oct 17, 2015]
  • V4.51: Documentation changes. [Sep 13, 2015]
  • V4.50: Adding a settings page with detailed help on the plugin. Compatibility with WordPress 4.3. [Aug 10, 2015]
  • V4.40: Compatibility with WordPress 4.2. [April 25, 2015]
  • V4:30: Compatibility with WP4.1. [Jan 8, 2015]
  • V4.21: Minor change to the admin interface. [Sep 9, 2011]
  • V4.20: Bug fixes, compatibility with WP4.0. [Sep 8, 2014]
  • V4.10: Accumulated refactoring changes. [May 7, 2014]
  • V4.03: Compatibility with WordPress V3.9. [Apr 18, 2014]
  • V4.02: Further minor fixes to suppress PHP notices. [Mar 29, 2014]
  • V4.01: Bug fix in the widget javascript code. [Mar 29, 2014]
  • V4.00: Major overhauling of the design. [Mar 29, 2014]
  • V3.31: Minor refactoring changes. [Mar 24, 2014]
  • V3.30: Compatibility with WP3.8. Documentation changes. [Dec 19, 2013]
  • V3.20: Compatibility with WP3.7. Some minor documentation changes. [Nov 9, 2013]
  • V3.10: Compatibility with WP3.6. Some additional tooltips to help the user. [Aug 15, 2013]
  • V3.01: Documentation changes only. [May 21, 2013]
  • V3.00: Major upgrade with blog page translation as well as Google translate to seed plugin translation. [May 20, 2013]
  • V2.23: Proper session initialization. [Mar 30, 2013]
  • V2.22: Proper use of SESSION variables. [Feb 18, 2013]
  • V2.21: Fixes in the plugin updater. [Oct 17, 2012]
  • V2.20: Rolling out in-app version update. [Sep 30, 2012]
  • V2.13: Proper session initialization. [Mar 30, 2013]
  • V2.12: Proper use of SESSION variables. [Feb 18, 2013]
  • V2.11: Bug fixes (Fatal error: Call-time pass-by-reference has been removed). [Jan 27, 2013]
  • V2.10: Including a support link on the admin page. [Sep 30, 2012]
  • V2.06: Taking care of some debug notices from WordPress debug mode. [Aug 28, 2012]
  • V2.05: Minor changes to the admin page. [July 18, 2012]
  • V2.04: Taking care of magic_quotes_gpc in PHP. [May 18, 2012]
  • V2.03: Renaming the plugin to drop the word Lite. [May 11, 2012]
  • V2.02: Changing the php file search to recursive. [Mar 20, 2012]
  • V2.01: Adding a new feature to create a new MO file (rather than just editing an existing one). [Mar 19, 2012]
  • V2.00: Releasing a Lite and Pro version. [Mar 6, 2012]
  • V1.01: Correcting a few minor bugs (a) Author email (of the plugin being translated was set to the author of this plugin. (b) The name of the plugin was set to Easy AdSense (Thanks, Sub!). (c) Some corrections are needed for escaping quotation marks and line breaks in locales other than English. Will include them in the next release. (Hard to test because my locale is en_US).
  • V1.00: Initial release. [July 21, 2009]

Frequently Asked Questions

I installed the plugin. Nothing happens. Where is the translator?

Please go to Appearance -> Widgets, drag and drop the Easy Translator widget to the sidebar of your choice. Select Microsoft (default) or Google and save. You will find the translator widget on your sidebar.

The Pro version is supposed to let me customize the translation widget colors. How?

Please go to Appearance -> Widgets and add/modify the translation widgets. You will see the color pickers there.

Looks good, but doesn't work!

Easy Translator is a fairly complicated program. If you find a bug or anything that doesn't work as expected, please do not keep it to youself. Please post it in the forum or email me. I really would like to make it work perfectly.

This plugin conflicts with other plugins. What to do now?

Easy Translator uses the PHP "super-global" variables ($_SESSION[]) to hold various strings and settings between your visits so that your translation work is not accidentally erased. I hope to have implemented it safely. But as any developer will tell you, there is nothing safe about using globals. If you find anything amiss, I'd appreciate it if you could let me know. Please post it in the forum or contact me.

If you have a question or comment about the Pro version, please do not use the forum hosted at WordPress.org, but contact the plugin author using our support portal.

The PO files created generate errors when I run msgfmt on them. What are these errors?

The plugin has a known issue with quotation marks within strings. Some of the quotations marks don't get escaped with a backslash. I think this issue is locale-specific, and don't know how to solve it. If you have any ideas, please let me know. The workaround is to edit the generated PO files with a text editor and go to the lines that give you errors in msgfmt. You will most likely find some unescaped quotes that you should prepend a backslash to. It should then go through msgfmt without error. Another known problem is that in some locales, the \n character in the first few lines appear as n -- again in a locale-specific way.

How do I get it to translate my blog pages/posts?

To enable blog page/post translation, find the Easy Translator widget (under the Appearance -> Widgets menu on your WordPress admin page) and drop it on a sidebar. If you have the Pro version of the plugin, you can tweak the colors of the widget to match your theme.

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