Prepare a translation import

Preparation determines whether exported text can be matched safely on the destination site. POM Translate imports by exact source-text match; it does not recreate missing posts, terms, strings, or slugs from the JSON file.

Prepare the destination

1. Install and activate a compatible POM Translate version.
2. Configure the intended base language and target languages.
3. Move or create the WordPress content before importing translations.
4. Save or scan that content so POM Translate has extracted its source strings.
5. Confirm a representative source string appears in the Translation Manager.
6. Create a full database backup.

Only locales enabled on the destination and different from its base locale can be selected for import.

Inspect the file

Use an original JSON export created by POM Translate. The importer requires:

• a top-level JSON object;
• format version 1;
• a non-empty translations map grouped by locale;
• an original, translated, and valid status value for every entry.

Accepted statuses are pending, mt, human, and reviewed. Empty originals, malformed JSON, unsupported versions, and invalid statuses fail validation.

Protect exact matches

Changes to punctuation, whitespace, HTML, capitalization, or source wording can prevent a match. Complete the content migration and source extraction before translating or rewriting the destination content.

Do not manually alter protected tokens such as paired placeholder markers. During import, translated HTML is sanitized and entries with invalid placeholder structure are skipped.

Choose an existing-translation policy

• Skip existing translations preserves a non-empty translation already stored for a matching string. This is the safer default.
• Override existing translations writes the imported value over matching stored translations.

The choice applies to the selected locale. Import one locale at a time, starting with a small representative language and reviewing the result before continuing.