WordPress.org

Pascal Birchler

Dion Hulse

WordPress Performance Team

Making internationalization/localization in WordPress faster than ever before.
<h3>Disclaimer about WordPress 6.5</h3>
Attention: most functionality of this plugin has been merged into WordPress 6.5! You might not need it anymore.
However, this plugin is still relevant for cases where language packs are not downloaded from WordPress.org but somewhere else, for example if you are developing your own plugins or using commercial plugins.
The Performant Translations plugin converts the translation files of those plugins to the new file format introduced in WordPress 6.5, to really optimize them for speed.
<h3>What this plugin does</h3>
This project uses a new approach to handle translation files in WordPress, making localization blazing fast.
An <a href="https://make.wordpress.org/core/2023/07/24/i18n-performance-analysis/" rel="nofollow ugc">in-depth i18n performance analysis</a> showed that localized WordPress sites load significantly slower than a site without translations.
With this plugin’s new approach to localization, this overhead is massively reduced, making your site fast again. It does so by converting <code>.mo</code> translation files to <code>.php</code> files.
If your site is using a language other than English (US), you should see immediate speed improvements simply by activating this plugin.

Performant Translations


This is a commendable effort, and it came out at the perfect time, at least for me.



I am looking forward to seeing how it evolves, and I hope to see it merged with the core in the fourth phase of the Gutenberg project.


Commendable effort


Installed this plugin to see what the effect is on my site. I am not yet 100% sure that it makes a big difference. But that all depends on the amount of texts used on your site. So far no bad experiences


Plugin speeds up the presentation of your site


I've got a multi language site (with WPML) that has a huge performance problem. I was not able to figure out what is actually causing the performance problem, the main problem probably has nothing to do with i18n, this plugin still helps cause it significantely speeds up the translations, leaving the only bottleneck to be the unknown problem.



Many thanks for your efforts!


Cool

Making internationalization/localization in WordPress faster than ever before.

Thanks to language packs it’s easier than ever before to change the main language of your site. 
However, in some cases a single locale is not enough. When WordPress can’t find a translation for the active locale, it falls back to the original English strings. 
That’s a poor user experience for many non-English speakers.
This feature project aims to change that by letting users choose multiple languages for displaying WordPress in. 
That way you can set some sort of “fallback chain” where WordPress tries to load translations in your preferred order.
Please help us test this plugin and let us know if something is not working as you think it should.
Keyboard Shortcuts
<ul>
<li><code>Arrow Up</code>: Move selected locale one position up.</li>
<li><code>Arrow Down</code>: Move selected locale one position down.</li>
<li><code>Home</code>: Select first locale in the list.</li>
<li><code>End</code>: Select last locale in the list.</li>
<li><code>Backspace</code>/<code>Delete</code>: remove the selected locale from the list.</li>
<li><code>Alt+A</code>: Add the current locale from the dropdown to the list.</li>
</ul>
Note: the Preferred Languages UI needs to be focused in order for the keyboard shortcuts to work.
Merging Translations
Previously, only the first available translation for a given locale and domain will be loaded. 
However, when translations are incomplete, some strings might still be displayed in English. 
That’s a poor user experience as well.
To prevent this, Preferred Languages now automatically merges all incomplete translations in the list.
the <code>preferred_languages_merge_translations</code> filter can be used to opt out of this behavior. 
It provides three parameters:
<ol>
<li><code>$merge</code> – Whether translations should be merged. Defaults to <code>true</code>.</li>
<li><code>$domain</code> – The text domain</li>
<li><code>$current_locale</code> – The current locale.</li>
</ol>
<h4>Get Involved</h4>
Active development is taking place on <a href="https://github.com/swissspidy/preferred-languages" rel="nofollow ugc">GitHub</a>.
If you want to get involved, check out <a href="https://github.com/swissspidy/preferred-languages/issues" rel="nofollow ugc">open issues</a> and join the <a href="https://wordpress.slack.com/messages/core-i18n" rel="nofollow ugc">#core-i18n</a> channel on <a href="https://wordpress.slack.com/" rel="nofollow ugc">Slack</a>. If you don’t have a Slack account yet, you can sign up at <a href="https://make.wordpress.org/chat/" rel="nofollow ugc">make.wordpress.org/chat/</a>.

Preferred Languages

Esto es imprescindible para cualquier usuario no angloparlante. El estado de las traducciones es irregular y sería perfecto tener un segundo e incluso un tercer idioma local para cargar si algo falta en tu idioma local, y así que no salga media web en español - por ejemplo - y el resto en inglés.

Esto ya estaría en WordPress si los principales equipos de desarrollo no fuesen angloparlantes, y claro, para ellos no es una prioridad ni de lejos.

Imprescindible - Debería estar ya en WordPress

Thanks for Pascal to solve the problem of fallback languages. It is time to add it to the core and would show that WordPress is thinking globally.

In core, please

I think this should be in Core for websites with several possible languages. I like it very much! Specially I appreciate that each user can also choose languages from the selected languages. 
(I am developing a translation plugin for my own needs to use Google Translate to translate posts/pages and complement it.)

Very necessary in core


I honestly think that this should be a core feature of WP. 



The only thing wrong I notice is that when you are looking at the front end... The language of the admin bar changes into the site language but that's the only issue I have with this plugin at the time of writing. For the rest, it's a dream plugin.


Make this a core feature

Should be in the core!

Choose languages for displaying WordPress in, in order of preference.

Performant Translations vs Preferred Languages