Translating GiveWP with Polylang

Polylang is a great plugin for creating bilingual or multilingual WordPress websites. GiveWP is compatible with Polylang, allowing you to provide separate GiveWP donation forms and donation confirmation pages in the languages that your donors speak.

How WordPress Websites can be Made Multilingual

WordPress historically speaking, has had issues with translating and enabling multilingual websites. These translation issues were traditionally addressed by plugins that access and attempt to change internationalization built into WP core using the gettext filter and other various filters. From there, the translations were applied conditionally based on what users needed. Read more about translating GiveWP into a separate language here.

Using Polylang to translate in WordPress

Polylang is a top rated translation plugin for WordPress. It supports bilingual or multilingual sites. To learn more about Polylang, click here.

Out of the box, GiveWP is compatible with Polylang. The following sections will assist you in getting up and running with Polylang and GiveWP.

Making GiveWP and Polylang Work Together.

In order to translate your GiveWP site with Polylang there are few main points to consider.

First, GiveWP’s Multi-Step Form, which loads in an iframe, is currently not able to be translated with Polylang. The Legacy Form Template on the other hand, is able to be translated quite easily. The Legacy Form Template is what will be used for configuring Polylang and GiveWP for the rest of this document.

Another point to consider is that Polylang creates 1 form per language. So that means that if you’re aiming to use 3 languages within GiveWP, you’ll need 3 separate forms that are translated by Polylang. This also means that totals for donors, donation amounts, etc. for your donation campaign will need to be tallied by combining the separate language forms. This can be accomplished with the Multi-Form Goal Block and the Multi-Form Goal Shortcode.

How to Use Polylang to Translate GiveWP

Create a new GiveWP form.
Select the Legacy Donation Form template:

Set the rest of the options as you normally would. Once you are done, click the (+) sign next to the language flag to translate the form:

The new form will not carry any of the settings of the original form so you will need to set everything up again.

You can translate any admin defined texts and/or labels right in the form.For example, you can translate the Submit Button text.

The Custom Amount and Donation Label text:

The Terms and Conditions heading and content:

If you have Offline Donations enabled as a payment option you can translate the Offline Donations instructions:

It is also important to translate the Donation Receipt and New Donation Notification emails:

Translating GiveWP related pages

Create a Donation Confirmation page and add the [give_receipt] shortcode.

Translate the page using Polylang and make sure the translation has the [give_receipt] shortcode too.

Create a Donation History page and add the [donation_history] shortcode.

Translate the page using Polylang and make sure the translation has the [donation_history] shortcode too.

Create a Donation Failed page and translate it with Polylang. This page does not require a shortcode.

Next, navigate to Polylang -> String Translations.

Each of the three pages that you just created has a field for each language enabled on the site. In these fields you need to enter the page IDs of the pages in their appropriate language.

Finally, add this snippet to your site to make Polylang “connect” those pages. We have a guide for adding custom code snippets to your WordPress site here.

That’s It!

Your donors can now donate in their preferred language. This guide is an opinionated guide for creating a multilingual site with GiveWP and Polylang. If you run into issues, both the Polylang support team and the GiveWP support team are here to help. Cheers to your multilingual fundraising!