Author 詩語

My flags are not displayed on mobile devices

Some themes don』t use the orignal menu walker provided by WordPress but a custom menu walker to display navigation menus. It is quite frequent that theme developpers forget that plugins can add images in menu items and thus create custom walkers which do not interpret the html code used by Polylang to display flags.
A quick fix is to replace the flags by the language names in the language switcher options. After that, please ask to your theme support how to solve this.

Google reports errors about hreflang attributes

You create one page in a first language and you publish it. Google crawls the page displayed without hreflang attributes because the page is not translated yet.
Later, you translate the page in a second language and publish the translation. Google crawls the translation and finds hreflang attributes since the page is translated. Google has crawled the first page and its translation and reports an error about hreflang attributes not matching.
Even later, Google crawls the first page again and finds the hreflang attributes. They are matching the hreflang attributes of the translated page. Google doesn』t report the error anymore. Please be patient. It can take time for Google to crawl your original page after you translated it.
You would have the same error if you originally have a page in several languages and add later an additional translation. In this case, the error may be reported during even more time as all translations must be crawled by Google before it removes the error.

The content is displayed in only one language on backend

Polylang introduces a new menu in the admin bar on top of the admin screen. You can choose to filter the content by language or display all languages. This filter is persistent (kept when you logout). It has no influence on the language of the user admin interface, which can be chosen in the user profile.

How to customize the names in the language switcher?

You can change the language name by modifying the full name of the language.

How to uninstall Polylang?

There are two things to understand when uninstalling or removing Polylang or Polylang Pro.

If you deactivate and delete the plugin from WordPress, you only remove the plugin and its files. Your settings, languages and information linking translations together will still exist in the database.
If you need to remove ALL Polylang data, including languages, settings, etc., you need to be able to modify the site』s wp-config.php file before deactivating and deleting the plugin.

To fully remove all Polylang data from your WordPress site, open your site』s wp-config.php file. Add define( 'PLL_REMOVE_ALL_DATA', true ); on its own line above the /* That's all, stop editing! Happy publishing. */ line.
Then when you deactivate and delete Polylang or Polylang Pro it will remove all of its data from your WordPress site database.

My theme provides a wpml-config.xml but nothing appears in the Strings translation table

This issue could occur with child themes when the parent theme stores its options in theme mods.
In that case, edit the wpml-config.xml file provided by your parent theme, and change the line:

to

Then put this new wpml-config.xml file into your child theme』s directory, or in /wp-content/polylang/. You must create the directory if it does not exist.

I can』t update the plugin

If your license key is not activated on your website, you will see that the update is available but you won』t be able to update the plugin. You may receive an error message such as:
Update Failed: Download failed. Unauthorized
Check that your license is still valid and that it is associated to the correct website. You can do that in your account > License keys > Manage sites.
Note that if you activated the licence key on a development site and moved it later to the production site, our server is not informed of the move and thus, although the license key may appear to be valid in your dashboard, it is still activated on your development site. You can avoid this issue by deactivating the license key on the development site, and then activating it on the production site.

How to translate the themes and plugins hardcoded strings?

This entry refers to strings which are written in the code of your plugin or theme. For strings entered in the theme or plugins options, you must use the Strings translations table.
Themes and plugins translations are handled in .po files ( human readable ) and .mo files ( machine readable ).
If your theme is correctly internationalized ( translation ready ), you can use Poedit or a plugin such as Loco translate to do the translation.
Plugins and themes available on wordpress.org can be translated online with Translating WordPress.
Ressources for developpers:
Theme internationalization
Theme localization
Child themes internationalization
How to Internationalize Your Plugin

How to remove bullets in front of the flags?

You can add the following lines in the style.css file of your child theme:
123.lang-item {  list-style: none;}

The characters are not correctly encoded

1. Open the the wp-config.php in the WordPress root directory and check that the DB_CHARSET is defined to UTF8:
12/** Database Charset to use in creating database tables. */define('DB_CHARSET', 'utf8');
2. Go in your database and check that the charset of your database and all your tables is UTF8:

If everything looks OK but the problem is still there, we recommend that you report your issue on the specific language forum to know how native speakers handle these characters.