How to translate WordPress’ admin to a different language?

While traveling in Venezuela, I was helping a friend setup his first WordPress site. He loved every single part of it, except that it was all in English and he wanted to see it in Spanish. Que problem-o.

Using a different language for WordPress’ admin, was something I’ve always wanted to learn, so I started looking around and I couldn’t believe how easy it was…

1. Download the language files

Go to this url http://codex.wordpress.org/WordPress_in_Your_Language and search for the language that you’re looking for:

1. Find the language that you’re looking for (i.e.: es_ES)
2. Download the whole WordPress package for that language
3. Uncompress the downloaded .zip file
4. All the language files will be under the /wp-content/languages/ directory

2.Move the languages files to your current WordPress installation

Copy the language files from the previously uncompressed package (from /wp-content/languages/) and move them to /wp-content/languages/ in your current WordPress installation.

3. Change the wp-config.php file

Go to the /wp-config.php file in your current WordPress installation and change the WPLANG constant to your language.

This is what mine looks like:

define('WPLANG', 'es_ES');

That’s it!

Reload your admin panel and it should now be translated to your own language (or your clients’).

While researching this stuff, I also found an amazing plugin to manually translate WordPress templates that use the __() and _e() l10n’s functions. If you don’t know what I’m talking about check this out http://codex.wordpress.org/I18n_for_WordPress_Developers. I’ll be writing a post about that soon, so stay close if this is something you’re interested in!