No more mixed languages: Stringwatch, a free watchdog plugin for TranslatePress

If you run a multilingual WordPress site and translate it by hand, you know the problem. You translate carefully to keep the quality and tone consistent, and still something slips through: a button label, an image’s alt text, a line somewhere in the footer. Every time you change the design, new strings appear that are easy to forget.

For your visitors it looks careless. They’re reading your English page, and suddenly there’s a sentence in German.

The problem: you can’t see what’s missing

TranslatePress, one of the most popular translation plugins for WordPress, shows you one page at a time. There’s no overview of what’s still untranslated across the whole site. And some text you never see at all, such as image alt texts, page titles, meta descriptions or labels meant for screen readers.

The fix: Stringwatch for TranslatePress

So I built a small plugin. It adds a Stringwatch tab to the TranslatePress settings. One click, and it:

• compares every page with its translation, exactly as a visitor sees them,
• lists every piece of text that’s identical in both versions, meaning it was never translated,
• checks the invisible parts too: alt texts, page titles, meta descriptions and screen-reader text,
• groups header and footer strings, so you fix them once instead of on every page,
• takes you straight into the TranslatePress editor for that page.

It also uses TranslatePress’ own data to tell you why something is untranslated. Maybe a translation is missing. Maybe one exists but isn’t showing because of a small spelling difference, such as curly quotes. Or maybe the text comes from somewhere TranslatePress doesn’t see.

Once you’ve fixed a page, the refresh icon next to it checks just that page again. You can work through the list page by page until it says ✓ Nothing left to fix.

It works with any language combination.

Free and open source

Stringwatch for TranslatePress is free and open source (GPL). It’s still in testing (version 0.x), so expect a few rough edges. If you use TranslatePress, give it a try:

👉 Stringwatch on WordPress.org

👉 Stringwatch on GitHub

Feedback and bug reports are welcome there.