Why you should Translate your WordPress Theme & Plugins

When it comes to 2016, wordpress theme localization has great relevance. There are two questions concerning the translation of a wordpress theme/plugin. The first one is obviously  “How to translate a wordpress theme”  and you can find lots of tutorials which answers this question. I would recommend a tutorial from TutsPlus which address this question very well. You can find it here:-  Translating your WordPress Theme

The next question is – Why you should translate your WordPress theme or plugin? You may find this question interesting because of the “why” part. In any case, its the sole discretion of theme developer to translate his work or not. Theme/plugin author is the sole decision maker here. Translating a theme to multiple languages is not an easy task either. It takes time and more work in front of your computer. For more it can be a boring task for some creative theme developers. Here comes the importance of “why” – why you should translate your theme?

The answer can be given in 2 short phrases – For More Reach and For More Sales 

In the case of a Theme developer who publishes his work for free, his objective is to reach maximum people through his work. He wishes that maximum people should download his work and make it live in their domains. By increasing the reach, the theme author might be gaining more visibility, more references to his name/company, he is increasing chances of gaining more customization works for his themes and such things.

In the case of a Premium Theme developer who sells his work for profits, his primary objective is maximum sales. What if your theme is written in English only? Usage of WordPress is distributed across all the continents in our world and the most surprising factor is that only USA and United Kingdom falls in the top 10 WordPress using countries with English as native language. The other countries are Spain, Germany, Indonesia, India, South Africa, Brazil and other countries. If you are a premium theme developer who uses ThemeForest Marketplace to sell your theme, you may already have experienced the need for translating your themes(a majority of themeforest’s theme buyers are from non English speaking countries). However not all marketplaces are same and there are people who prefers to sell themes using their own branded store.

Note:- If you are new to premium theme development and would like to know more about the many ways in which you can sell your premium themes, I have written a detailed article which explains all the ways and marketplaces to sell premium wordpress themes.

WordPress is used in many non English speaking countries like France, Brazil, Spain, Germany, Indonesia, Italy, and many such countries. These countries and its people are not very comfortable with English language and they prefer their native language in any products they buy. Same is the case with WordPress Themes and Plugins.

I have written a detailed article which analyses the usage of WordPress in different countries and the languages in which it is used. You can read it here:- Which all countries and languages use WordPress.  According to this analysis, English language is used in only 66% of total WordPress blogs and 9 other languages contribute to 33.1% of WordPress blogs. 

 According to the screenshot, English language accounts for 66% of WordPress usage whereas Spanish, Portuguese and Indonesian together accounts for 18.7% of WordPress localisations. These 4 languages together constitutes 84.7%. Rest of the languages taken together contributes only 15.3% of which Italian,German,French, Russian, Vietnamese and Swedish together contributes 8.4% of total WordPress localisations.

 My advice to sell more premium themes or to increase the number of downloads for your free theme is to make it available in maximum possible languages. But at the same time there is no point in translating it to all the languages available in this world. You need to translate the theme to a particular language, only if there is a demand for themes in that language. Here comes the importance of this article which analyses the usage of WordPress in different languages. According to our analysis, it makes sense to release your WordPress theme in 9 languages (in addition to English) and they are Spanish, Portuguese, Indonesian, Italian,German,French, Russian, Vietnamese and Swedish.