Languages & translation

TubePress is multilingual to its core. The interface, your URLs, your taxonomy and your pages can all be translated, search engines are told about every language version through hreflang, and right-to-left scripts are handled automatically. Visitors are served the right language from a clean, prefixed URL.

Everything is managed from /admin/languages.

Multilingual TubePress

Translation works on three layers, each independent of the others:

• Interface strings — the navigation, buttons, labels and messages of the theme, shipped as language files and overridable per language.
• URL slugs — route segments such as /categories or /search can be localised so the whole address reads naturally.
• Content — categories, tags, performers, channels and pages each carry their own translated name, description and slug.

Available languages

Thirty languages ship with TubePress: Arabic, Bengali, Bulgarian, Chinese, Czech, Dutch, English, French, German, Greek, Hebrew, Hindi, Hungarian, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Malay, Persian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Serbian, Spanish, Swedish, Thai, Turkish, Ukrainian and Vietnamese.

Three of them are right-to-left: Arabic Persian Hebrew. English is always enabled and acts as the fallback for any string that has not been translated.

The language URL prefix

Your default language is served at the site root with no prefix. Every other enabled language lives under a short two-letter prefix, for example:

https://example.com/category/amateur      (default)
https://example.com/fr/category/amateur   (French)
https://example.com/ar/category/amateur   (Arabic)

A visitor's choice is remembered in a cookie, so they stay in their language as they browse. They can switch with a ?_lang= parameter, which sets the cookie and redirects to the prefixed URL. If browser auto-detection is enabled, the Accept-Language header picks the best enabled language on a first visit. Admin and install pages always use the default language, and crawlers are never auto-redirected so they index the canonical address.

RTL support

When the active language is Arabic, Persian or Hebrew, TubePress sets the document direction to rtl and exposes right-to-left flags to the theme, so layout, alignment and mirroring are handled for you with no extra configuration. Left-to-right languages render exactly as before.

Managing languages

The /admin/languages screen is where you control the whole system:

• Enable or disable each language (up to eight) and choose which one is the default.
• Turn browser auto-detection on or off.
• Open the translation editor for any enabled language to override individual interface strings. Edits are stored as overrides on top of the shipped files, grouped into sections such as Navigation, Video, Comments and URL Slugs.
• Reset any string back to its shipped default at any time.

Translating content

Beyond the interface, your catalogue itself is translatable. Categories, tags, performers, channels and pages each store a translated name, description and slug per language. Those translations feed straight into the multilingual sitemaps and the bidirectional hreflang tags, so a French category page is correctly linked to its English counterpart for search engines. See SEO for how the hreflang and sitemap layer works.

AI translation

Translating a large taxonomy by hand is slow, so TubePress includes an AI Translate tool for tags and categories. From the tags or categories admin screen, open the AI Translate dialog and it will:

• Show how many items and target languages are involved, and the cost before you confirm.
• Optionally skip items that are already translated.
• Optionally auto-translate new items as you add them in future.
• Run in the background — you can close the window — and automatically refund any unprocessed items if you stop early.

AI translation uses your account credits, so you must first connect your TubePress account. The per-item cost is displayed up front. See Credits & AI for how credits work and how to top up.

Tips

• Enable only the languages you can keep current; English fallback covers any gaps.
• Pick your default language deliberately — it is the one that owns the unprefixed, root URLs.
• Use string overrides for brand-specific terms rather than editing language files directly.
• Translate URL slugs as well as labels for the cleanest localised addresses.
• Batch-translate tags and categories with the AI tool, then refine the important ones by hand.

Next steps