Translating names of months and common terms

[James]

Hi,

we’re using Events Calendar Pro successfully and are currently testing the latest update before we push it to the live site (it’s looking great!) – but I was wondering if you could help us with the following. Let me explain.

We are on a website which defaults to Maltese and is translated to English – I had applied to start translating the Pro plugin to Maltese (http://translations.theeventscalendar.com/projects/tribe-events-calendar/mt/default) but strangely the work has disappeared (URL not found). Apart from that, the strings available for translation had NOT included the terms I desperately need translated (see below)

My priority here is to get everything translated into Maltese – including names of Months as well as common terms (such as Next Events, Previous Events, Upcoming Events, Events from:) etc – please have a look at http://www.kreattivita.org/events/

We use WPML. I have located all the string translations I could find (for example month names I could locate) and translated these, however these were not implemented on the front end. Certain terms (such as the above, Next Events, etc) could not be found by the String Translation tool.

Is there any hope for getting these terms translated? We are so close to having everything in place thanks to your fantastic plugin, this last bit is really frustrating.

Thanks a lot,

James

[George]

Hey James,

I’m really sorry about the frustration here. We’re a bit frustrated with translations within WordPress at present, too, because things have changed recently and we’re working hard to accommodate the changes.

What are those changes? Well, specifically, WordPress.org is now hosting translations for plugins directly. So as you mentioned, the work done on our own translations site is now moved here → https://translate.wordpress.org/projects/wp-plugins/the-events-calendar/stable

You can read more about the new WordPress.org-official translation site here.

All of our premium add-ons are still hosted on http://translations.theeventscalendar.com, however. If any of this is confusing, please give these articles a read as they cover the changes and have been updated recently for the sake of doing so:

• Translating The Events Calendar: http://theeventscalendar.com/knowledgebase/translating-the-events-calendar/

• Translating our premium add-ons: https://theeventscalendar.com/knowledgebase/adding-or-updating-a-translation/

• Changing the language on your site: https://theeventscalendar.com/knowledgebase/changing-the-language-on-your-calendar/

—

In regards to your specific points about strings that haven’t been translated, unfortunately the names of Months, Days, etc. are not dictated by our plugin but by WordPress itself, using the date_i18n() function → https://codex.wordpress.org/Function_Reference/date_i18n

Next you mention that these strings weren’t translatable:

Next Events, Previous Events, Upcoming Events, Events from

What’s probably happening here is that the string replacement in use for these strings is not being found by your “String locator” or other methods. To clarify, “Next Events” does not exist in our code; instead you’ll find “Next %s”. “Events from:” would be “%s from:”, and so on.

This method of string replacement means that the oft-used words “Event” and “Events” don’t have to be translated over and over again; you translate them once, then WordPress replaces “%s” with the translated word. It also allows for the simple code changes described here: https://theeventscalendar.com/knowledgebase/changing-the-word-events-to-something-else/

As a final note, WPML is not 100% compatible with The Events Calendar 🙁 This has been a long-standing issue and we have begun to really dedicate time to improving compatibility in recent releases, but there are still many places where translations can end up incomplete or just not translated at all.

I hope this information clarifies some things – I’m sorry in advance if this is not the case. Please let me know what you think and what further questions you have on this matter!

Sincerely,
George

[James]

Thank you George, I think your reply is very comprehensive although it doesn’t solve everything due to the scenario where compatibility with WPML is still not 100% there. I do understand however – Maltese is a relatively small language and these issues are still widespread across the web – bilingual websites in our language are very few and far in between.

Thank you for your help.

[George]

I’m sorry about the lack of 100% compatibility, @James 🙁 It’s truly something we’re not proud of and are working hard to improve.

I’m sorry for the inconveniences that arise from all of this, but wish you the best of luck with your site in the meantime.

Cheers,
George

[Support Droid]

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