Internationalize plugin so strings can be translated in WPML

Question

A third party developer made a text widget with title, body and thumbnail. This accompany widget plugin has not been internationalized and therefore the strings do not appear in WPML's string translation management. I need them to be loaded. So I am trying to register the plugings domain as indicated here, but the code I added:

function accompany_text_init() {
    $plugin_dir = basename(dirname(__FILE__));
    load_plugin_textdomain( 'accompany-text', false, $plugin_dir );
}
add_action('init', 'accommpany_text_init');

does not load. It seems as the widget is not registered. Here is the full code. What am I doing wrong? Is the call position off? A plugin coding newbie here and a junior PHP-er so would appreciate some help.

Answer 1

You have to use translation functions.

Example:

_e( 'Number', 'accompany-text' );

Answer 2

You will need to add the following

$plugin_dir = basename(dirname(__FILE__)); 
load_plugin_textdomain( 'accompany-text', false, $plugin_dir );

inside where the widget class is initialised. In your example, inside the AccompanyPostWidget function.

That said, there doesn't appear to be any text strings that are translatable in the widget class you've linked to. For instance, to translate the word number (as in Toscho's answer)

<?php _e( 'Number', 'accompany-text' ); ?>

As a more complete example, the following loads the text domain and makes the Widget description translatable:

 function AccompanyPostWidget(){
    $plugin_dir = basename(dirname(__FILE__)); 
    load_plugin_textdomain( 'accompany-text', false, $plugin_dir );
    $widget_ops = array('classname' => 'AccompanyPostWidget', 'description' => __( 'Displays a Accompany post with thumbnail','accompany-text');
    $this->WP_Widget('AccompanyPostWidget', 'Accompany Text Widget', $widget_ops);
  }

Side remark

The following would 'normally' be sufficient, but isn't loaded in time to translate the widget's title and description:

function accompany_text_init() {
    $plugin_dir = basename(dirname(__FILE__));
    load_plugin_textdomain( 'accompany-text', false, $plugin_dir );
}
add_action('init', 'accompany_text_init');

Answer 3

After some great help - even though a bit late - from the guys at WPML, especially @Brooks I managed to ge the code fixed. The icl_register_strings() function was in the wrong place so WPML I shifted it to the update() Method from where one can sanitize the instance variables before they are used by the widget. The icl_t() function was put in the widget() Method. The widget() which is used to display content within the widget when it appears in the sidebar on your blog. They also changed one of the $name argument of icl_register_string($context, $name, $value) to 'widget body – ' . $this->id so we can now have unique values stored for that value. Code can be seen here: https://github.com/jasperf/Accompany-Widget