Multilanguage

The Newsletter plugin supports multilanguage blogs managed with WPML and Polylang. Translatepress is partially supported.

Each administrative panel can show a set of global language-independent sets of options and a more specific language-dependent set of options. Options (global or language-specific) are then saved, merged, and extracted automatically by Newsletter.

Important: general settings that do not depend on the language can be set on the administrative side when and only when you select “all languages” as the current language in the language switcher in the admin top bar.

Select “all languages” to see all panel settings

What's inside

The Newsletter dedicated page for multilanguage

It’s a regular WordPress page that is created and configured on Newsletter main settings on the first installation and used to display general messages and forms.

Examples are the subscription form, the profile editing form, the activation required message, and the welcome message. Read more about this page.

This page should contain only the [newsletter] shortcode. Please review it before proceeding.

In a multilanguage blog, this page should have as many variants as the number of languages available: Newsletter uses your configured page and asks the multilanguage plugin to return the correct translated version.

Every page version must contain the [newsletter] shortcode but the title can be translated.

Segmenting your subscribers

In a multi-language environment, Newsletter is usually able to identify the language used when the subscription is submitted and it stores the language code in the subscriber profile.

That information can be used when selecting the subscribers to target with a newsletter and is used to show the subscribers the messages in the correct language. That provides a basic per-language segmentation.

To set a default language for subscribers missing that field, you can do it on the Subscriber Maintenance panel.

Using the list auto-assignment

On the lists configuration panel, you can select which list should be pre-assigned to a subscriber by language. Assigning automatically a list by subscription language may help in building complex targeting rules but usually, it is not required.

In fact, on multilanguage blogs, when the user subscribes, a language is associated to its profile and can be used on newsletters’ targeting.

Read more about lists and spacially the use of lists with multilanguage.

Widgets

You’ll add two widgets and set them to be shown under different languages separately (with the help of your multilanguage plugin) and configured to add the subscribers to different lists. Anyway, you can even use a single widget if you set the link between a language and a list. See above.

Service messages (welcome, activation, goodbye)

The Newsletter plugin displays some messages to your subscribers when they subscribe and reach the welcome page and receive the welcome email. If you activated the double opt-in even more messages are shown.

Translating those messages into other languages is really easy: you should switch to the language you want to work with using the WPML/Polylang administrative language switcher (on the black-top bar). Then you can move to the List building>Subscription configuration panel.

The Newsletter plugin will show a “reduced” panel with only the options that can be translated. The full panel of options is only available when the administrative side is switched to the main (default) language.

Once you input the translation, Newsletter will use the correct text to follow up the subscription process using the blog language your reader was in at the subscription time.

Subscribers are associated with the language they were on their first subscription. That language code is then used every time newsletter needs to show a message to a subscriber.

Form field translations

Form fields can be translated from the Subscription>Form fields and translations panel. As for any other panel, when you enter that configuration area, you can see the full options when in “all languages” mode, or the reduced of options (the one translatable) when in a specific language mode.

List names

Lists are uniquely defined without links to the language. so if a list is pre-assigned or private, that configuration is valid for every language. When you switch the admin side to a specific language mode, you can anyway translate the list name.

Composing newsletters

A newsletter is just a set of contents. Some of them are not translatable, like an image, others should be retrieved from the blog in a language-specific context. Hence themes and composer blocks can offer a language option used to generate the correct content. If a theme or a block does not have the language option, it means it’s not able to manage a multilanguage environment or it has not yet been updated.

Please note: newsletter content is NOT dynamic. Hence if you’re targeting your Italian subscribers you should compose a newsletter with only Italian content. When you address English subscribers you’ll create an English newsletter. And so on for German, Spanish, and every other language, you manage.

So it’s important to define lists for every language and follow the setup explained earlier to get the best results.

Translated or localized?

Sometimes a blog uses a multilanguage plugin just to translate the content. But many time is not just a translation, is actually a totally different content in different languages (you can correctly observe this case should be managed with a multisite and not with a multilanguage plugin but there are pros and cons on both choices).

In this case, where you’re creating localized content and not purely translated content, the lists used to separate language 1 from language 2 are actually used to separate the local content in language 1 and the local content in language 2.

You can offer the option to your subscribers, after the subscription, to select to be part even of the list dedicated to the alternative language than selected upon the first subscription. That can be done in the profile editing panel setting the two lists to be displayed and changeable.