Note: This is a translation of my post WordPress Themes lokalisieren. Thanks to Ainslie Johnson for reviewing my translation.
A few days ago the WP-Andreas09 theme for wordpress became available. This is based on a design by Andreas Viklund, Ainslie Johnson did a very good job of converting it for wordpress.
Unfortunately the language used inside the templates was English, as it is for most themes available. To make a translation you need to go through each template file, find the English words and translate one by one.
In wordpress itself, localization is done by .po/.mo files. Hence there are localization files for a number of languages already. All you have to do, is to copy this file to your directory, change a parameter and wordpress can speak a new language.
So, why not use this mechanism for themes? There are very few existing themes working this way. More precisely, I only know of two Giraffe and NIkynik Blue. Even then, I was unable to find detailed documentation on how these themes were built.
Theme localization is very easy to do, when you manage to understand how wordpress and gettext work together.
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