How to Translate a WordPress Theme into Chilean Spanish with Poedit

Why Chile gets its own translation

Most translation guides for WordPress stop at “Spanish” as if it were one language. It isn’t, at least not for the people reading your site. WordPress ships separate locales for Spain (es_ES), Mexico (es_MX), Argentina (es_AR), Chile (es_CL) and several more, and each one carries its own habits for dates, money and tone. If your readers are in Santiago or Valparaíso, a theme translated for Madrid will work, but it will read slightly off: “ordenador” where a Chilean would say “computador”, “vosotros” forms that nobody in Latin America uses day to day.

The good news is that a theme translation is just two small files, and you can build them with a free desktop program. This walkthrough uses Arras as the example, but the steps are the same for any theme that is properly prepared for translation.

What you need before you start

• A .pot file. This is the template: every translatable string in the theme, with empty slots for the translation. When Arras 3 came out, a fresh .pot file went into the /languages folder, because the language files from Arras 1.x don’t work with Arras 3. Check your own theme’s folder for something similar.
• Poedit. A free editor for gettext files, available for Windows, macOS and Linux.
• The text domain. Open the theme’s functions.php and look for the load_theme_textdomain() call. The first argument is the text domain, and you will need it for the file name later.

Step 1: Create the translation from the template

In Poedit, choose to create a new translation and point it at the theme’s .pot file. Poedit asks for the language; pick Spanish (Chile) rather than plain Spanish, so the file header records es_CL. Spanish uses two plural forms, one for exactly one item and one for everything else, and Poedit fills in that plural rule for you.

Now work down the list. A few things are easy to break:

• Placeholders. Strings like Posted on %s or %1$s by %2$s must keep every placeholder exactly as written. You can move them around inside the sentence (Spanish word order often needs that), but a missing %s can print a warning or leave a hole in the page.
• Plurals. Comment counts come in pairs, such as “1 Comment” and “% Comments”. Fill in both boxes, or one of the two cases will stay in English.
• HTML inside strings. If the original contains a link or an <em>, the translation needs the same tags.

Step 2: Write it the way Chileans read

This is the part software can’t do for you. A few conventions matter on a Chilean site:

• Use tú for a friendly tone and usted for a formal one, and pick one for the whole theme. Argentine copy writes “registrate” with the stress on the last syllable; Chilean copy writes “regístrate”.
• Spanish opens questions and exclamations with inverted marks: “¿Buscas algo?” rather than “Buscas algo?”. Search boxes and 404 pages are where this usually gets forgotten.
• Money uses a dot to group thousands and the same “$” sign as the dollar, so one and a half million pesos is written $1.500.000.

It helps to read a few real sites written for Chilean readers before you settle on wording. A Spanish-language guide to Jugabet, a betting and casino brand that operates in Chile, is a handy reference for how this looks on a live page: headings such as “¿Cómo Registrarse?” and amounts like “$1.500.000 CLP” are exactly the kind of text your translated theme has to display without breaking lines or clipping characters.

Step 3: Save and name the files

When you save, Poedit writes two files: the .po file you edited and a compiled .mo file, which is the one WordPress actually loads. Keep both. Naming depends on where you put them:

• Inside the theme’s languages folder, name them after the locale only: es_CL.po and es_CL.mo.
• In wp-content/languages/themes/, add the text domain in front: for a text domain of arras that is arras-es_CL.po and arras-es_CL.mo.

The second location is the one I’d recommend. Updating a theme replaces its folder, and translations stored inside it disappear with the old files. Keeping them under wp-content/languages also matters for themes that are no longer actively developed, as is the case with Arras: if you ever patch the theme yourself or install a community fork, your translation stays where it is.

Step 4: Switch the site to Chilean Spanish

Go to Settings → General and set Site Language to Español de Chile. WordPress downloads the core translation for that locale, and your theme picks up its own .mo file on the next page load. Each user can also choose a different language for the dashboard in their profile, so editors who prefer English don’t have to work in Spanish.

A common surprise: WordPress looks for a file with the exact locale. If you only have es_ES.mo and the site is set to Chilean Spanish, the theme will show English. Copying and renaming the file gets you started, but then go back and fix the words that sound like Spain.

Step 5: Check dates and layout

Dates are the last loose end. The date format in Settings → General uses PHP format characters, so letters you want printed literally need a backslash. j \d\e F \d\e Y gives “14 de septiembre de 2026”, which is how dates are usually written in Chile.

Then look at the theme in a browser, on a phone as well as a desktop. Spanish sentences run longer than English ones, and older themes with fixed-width sidebars and menus show it first: buttons wrap onto two lines, tab labels overflow, and widget titles get cut off. In Arras, check the tabbed sidebar, the featured slideshow captions and the post meta line. Fixing these in a child theme stylesheet is usually a matter of a smaller font size or letting a button grow.

When the theme itself needs work

If some text stays in English whatever you do, the string is probably hard-coded in the template instead of being wrapped in a translation function like __() or _e(). The fix belongs in the theme, and in a child theme you can override that template file and wrap the string yourself. For an old theme like Arras that is often the fastest route, and it gives you a Chilean Spanish site that reads as if it had been written there.

Photo: IBM Model M keyboard with Spanish layout, by Wilfredor, Wikimedia Commons, CC0.