Changing the Language of Your WordPress Site From the Default U.S. English

Changing the language of your WordPress website takes only a few minutes. You don’t have to do a reinstall or even to upgrade any files. In fact, the core files remain the way they are.

Changing the Language Manually

Here’s a concise step-by-step guide on changing the language of an existing WordPress site.

1. Find the appropriate WordPress language files for your language at the language file repository here.
2. Download the appropriate language file on your HDD.
3. Log into your WordPress blog FTP server and navigate to /wp-content.
4. Create a new folder called /languages.
5. Upload the language file you’ve previously downloaded in the /languages directory.
6. To change the backend and frontend language, open wp-confing.phpand find the line:

   define ('WPLANG', '');

7. Replace it with:

   define ('WPLANG', 'es_ES');

8. es_ES is the locale for Spanish. Put in its place the locale code for your language (the files you’ve download from the repository are named after the locale code).
9. Save the changes.
10. Log into your administrator account and notice the change. You’ve just changed the language of your WordPress website.

Other Ways to Change the Language

The method described above is the manual way of changing your WordPress language. In many cases, changing the language can be even simpler than that because there is a good chance there is an official WordPress version out there in your own native language. For example, if you want Spanish localization, you can just grab the Spanish version of WordPress here.

For Bilingual or Multilingual Blogs

If you want to create bilingual posts or change languages between posts, there are a variety of plugins that can help you with that. Some examples:

• Polylang – adds multilingual content management support.
• qTranslate – adds multilinguage content management support, and alternative to Polylang.
• Xili-language – lets you manage a multilingual WordPress website in multiple languages.
• Transposh – adds translation support for no less than 66 languages.

Using WordPress in another language is easy.