Language translation on a fresh english installation

Question

i need to translate an english wordpress installation to italian language,but i would like to mantain both languages en/english, so the user can choose which to turn on fron the frontend side. I need italian as default language and english for choice, i would like to know if is it possible to have them without re-installing the wp, and how to do that?

Does i need to translate some file manually? or some plugin extension could help me?

Definitely i would like Italian language for Backend, and Eng/Ita (choose) for frontend side.

I Installed a third parties theme, don't know if this could help on translation :/

Any suggestion appriaciated, thanks.

Answer 1

Refer to the documentation for more details: http://codex.wordpress.org/Installing_WordPress_in_Your_Language

Skip the first two steps and the backend won't be translated.

1) Download the Italian version of WordPress.

2) Upload the files located in /wp-content/languages/ to your live site. These files are for translating the Backend.

3) Define the language in wp-config.php as define ('WPLANG', 'it_IT');. Before uploading the new version of wp-config.php, make a backup of the version in the live site.

4) The frontend translation is done by your theme and it needs the file: /wp-content/themes/your-theme/language/domainpath-it_IT.mo.

5) Much probably this file doesn't exist, and you have to translate it yourself. The same goes for any plugin that renders content that needs translation. Normally the translation files are inside a folder called languages, but it could be lang or similar.

6) The easiest way to translate theme/plugins is to use this plugin: Codestyling Localization. Or you can use the software PoEdit, more info in this Answer.