I wanted to change some automatically generated text for WooCommerce version 2.1.10 and found out that editing the “.po” language file directly in ~/public_html/wp-content/themes/mytheme/languages simply does not work. This is because there is both a .po and .mo file that needs to be updated.
One option was to install the Codestyling Localization plugin for WordPress, which just looked like another bulky WordPress plugin, that I did not need.
Alternative is to use a nifty little program called Poedit that you can install on your Desktop, be it Windows, Mac or Linux. Open up the .po file you want to edit, let’s say woocommerce-en_GB.po, do your edits with the graphical interface and save it.
It will automatically save for you both the woocommerce-en_GB.po & a new woocommerce-en_GB.mo file — it’s very easy. I found out that opening this directly from a Transmit disk mount of the web server stalled the program. So I just first dragged a copy of the .po file to a local directory, saved it and overwrote the two files on the web server.
Voilà — questions & comments welcome!
To efficiently localize .po files, you can also use this online translation management app: https://poeditor.com
This plugin will help you automate the translation process more: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/poeditor/
Hope this info will be helpful 🙂
Thanks for this info! 🙂