Translation from .mo file not working in theme

Question

I'm trying to add translations to my theme. I went through the documentation and many questions here on Wordpress Development Stack.

Setted a text domain in my style.css file:

/*
Theme Name: My Theme
Text Domain: my-theme
*/

Loaded the text domain in my functions.php file:

add_action( 'after_setup_theme', 'my_theme_load_theme_textdomain' );
function my_theme_load_theme_textdomain() {
    load_theme_textdomain( 'my-theme' );
}

Also tried passing a 2nd argument to load_theme_textdomain():

load_theme_textdomain( 'my-theme', get_template_directory() . '/languages' );

Added _e( 'Featured', 'my-theme' ) in my index.php file. Also tried without the 2nd argument _e( 'Featured' ).

Added both es.mo and es.po files into a languages folder in my theme root directory.

• languages\es.mo
• languages\es.po

Also tried naming them with the text domain as a prefix: my-theme-es.mo and my-theme-es.mo.

The content of es.po is as follow:

msgid "Featured"
msgstr "Destacados"

The es.mo file was generated using Poedit free version. Also tried with po2mo.net.

I setted the language to spanish in the General Settings page. Also tried adding define( 'WPLANG', 'es' ) to my wp-config.php file.

But everytime I get "Featured" instead of "Destacados" when the page is rendered.

I'm using WordPress 5.3 on Windows (XAMPP). I checked with phpinfo() that GetText support is enabled.

Any clues?

Thanks for your time.

Answer 1

Start a new theme from scratch to see if you have the same result. I test with theses files and the translation works

style.css

/*
Theme Name: My Theme
*/

functions.php

<?php

add_action( 'after_setup_theme', 'my_theme_load_theme_textdomain' );

function my_theme_load_theme_textdomain() {

    load_theme_textdomain( 'my-theme', get_template_directory() . '/languages' );

}

languages/es_ES.po (file languages/es_ES.mo created with poedit)

msgid "Featured"
msgstr "Destacados"

index.php

<?php

_e( 'Featured', 'my-theme' );