Can I change the contents of a description meta tag generated by Yoast?

Question

Essentially I have the Yoast plugin handling my SEO related things. The main one giving problems is the description meta tag.

The site is bilingual and I would like the description meta tag to be translated as well. Yoast currently does not provide that option, unless I get another plugin which I do not want to get into.

As it stands, I am told that I can insert the description meta tag through the functions.php using add_action. This unfortunately does not work as it only adds another description meta tag.

Currently my code looks like this:

function insert_meta_tag_in_head () {
    echo '<meta name="description" content="My New content" />';
}

add_action('wp_head', 'insert_meta_tag_in_head', 1); 

So basically this just gives me a second description meta tag. I have also seen in other threads, that if I want to replace a tag, I should use the do_action function. Which I call as follows:

do_action('wp_head', 'insert_meta_tag_in_head'); 

This however does nothing. What am I doing wrong? How can I change the contents of the description tag given to me through Yoast?

Answer 1

Take a look at WordPress SEO API Docs it appears you can modify the meta description tag will somthing like:

add_filter('wpseo_metadesc', function($description){
    if ($wtv_language == 'wtv') {
        $description = "my other language meta description here";
    }
    return $description;
});

Note that $wtv_language == 'wtv' would need to be replaced with whatever function/variable you're using to detect your language - and "my other language... would need to be replaced with a dynamic translated value, so each page gets a proper translated description, however you plan to do that.