Why Editing WooCommerce “.po” Language File Has No Effect

I wanted to change some automatically generated text for WooCommerce version 2.1.10 and found out that editing the “.po” language file directly in ~/public_html/wp-content/themes/mytheme/languages simply does not work. This is because there is both a .po and .mo file that needs to be updated.

WordPress Poedit

One option was to install the Codestyling Localization plugin for WordPress, which just looked like another bulky WordPress plugin, that I did not need.

Alternative is to use a nifty little program called Poedit that you can install on your Desktop, be it Windows, Mac or Linux. Open up the .po file you want to edit, let’s say woocommerce-en_GB.po, do your edits with the graphical interface and save it.

It will automatically save for you both the woocommerce-en_GB.po & a new woocommerce-en_GB.mo file — it’s very easy. I found out that opening this directly from a Transmit disk mount of the web server stalled the program. So I just first dragged a copy of the .po file to a local directory, saved it and overwrote the two files on the web server.

Voilà — questions & comments welcome!

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