Help Centre

Language and translations

Choose the language your marketplace speaks, change any text it shows, and edit wording straight on your site with the live translator.

Your marketplace speaks one main language. Menus, buttons, messages and the emails it sends all come in that language, and you can change any of those texts so the site uses your own words: “listing” instead of “ad”, “Sell” instead of “Post”, and so on.

This guide covers the main language and editing texts. To offer your site in several languages at once, see Multilingual sites.

Change your site’s language

  1. In the admin panel, go to Settings › Translations. The page is called Languages.
  2. The card at the top shows your current Site language. Below it, under All languages, find the language you want. Type in Search languages to filter the list.
  3. Click Use next to it and confirm.

Menus, buttons and system messages switch to the new language straight away.

Some content is yours, not part of the software, so it doesn’t change with the language: your pages, email templates, category and location names, custom field labels, and your members’ listings. Edit those in their own places.

English: UK or US?

Yclas has two English versions, en_UK and en_US, which differ in spelling (“favourites” or “favorites”). The email templates every site starts with are stored as UK English. If you switch to en_US, emails keep working (they fall back to the UK templates), but the email templates list looks empty. To edit them in US English, open Email, and under Email templates click Copy templates to en_US. The same applies to any other language: see Email templates.

On a multilingual site

If Multilingual is on in Settings › General, switching the main language changes which listings new visitors see, because each listing belongs to one language. The panel warns you before you switch. Read Multilingual sites first.

Change the texts on your site

Every text the software shows, from the “Post an ad” button to the “Your listing has been published” message, can be replaced with your own wording, in any language.

  1. Go to Settings › Translations.
  2. Click Edit texts on the Site language card, or Edit next to another language.
  3. Find the text. Type part of it in the Search box on the left and click Search.
  4. Each row shows the current text on the left (with the English original under it, marked EN:) and a box on the right, which holds your own wording if you’ve changed that text already and is empty otherwise. Type your wording in the box on the right. Copy text copies the current text into the box so you only have to change a word, and Open Google Translate opens a translation of the original in a new tab.
  5. Click Save at the bottom of the page.

Rows you have customised are shown in green; the others are red. Your texts are stored with your site, so they are kept when Yclas releases updates.

A few things to know about the editor:

  • Save saves the texts on the page you are looking at. The list is split into pages of 20, so save before you move to the next page or your changes are lost.
  • The search needs at least three characters and is case-sensitive: “Post” and “post” find different texts.
  • A text often appears in several places (a button, a page title, an email subject). Search for it and change every version you want.
  • To undo a change to one text, empty its box and click Save: the original text comes back.

Start again: Restore original

Once you’ve changed any text in a language, a Restore original button appears at the top of its edit page. It removes every text you changed in that language and brings back the original translation. Your browser asks you to confirm first (Remove all N texts you changed and go back to the original translation?).

Restore original can’t be undone. If you might want some of your wording back, click Download CSV first (see below) to keep a copy.

Translate in a spreadsheet

To translate or reword lots of texts at once, work in Excel, Google Sheets or Numbers instead of page by page. The Translate in a spreadsheet box at the top of the edit page has both buttons.

  1. Go to Settings › Translations and open the language with Edit texts or Edit.
  2. Click Download CSV. The file lists every text: the English original in the first column and the text your site shows now in the second.
  3. Open the file and change the second column. Leave the first column exactly as it is: it’s how each row is matched back to its text.
  4. Save the file as CSV.
  5. Back on the edit page, click Choose file (or Browse), pick your file and click Upload.

You see what changed, for example 12 texts changed, 1 back to the original, 2969 unchanged. Rows you didn’t change stay as they are, and a row you emptied goes back to the original text.

Good to know:

  • Files saved by Excel in any language work, whether they use commas or semicolons, so you don’t need to change any export settings.
  • Only the CSV downloaded from this page works: a file whose first column doesn’t match your site’s English texts is refused (No texts found in that file). Rows with an English text the site doesn’t know are skipped.
  • The file can be up to 5 MB, which is far more than every text needs.
  • The download and upload work on one language at a time: the one whose edit page you’re on.

Replace a word everywhere

The bar above the list replaces a word in all texts at once. For example, to call listings “offers” across an English site:

  1. In the first box type the word to find, for example listing, and in the second box the new word, offer.
  2. Choose where to look:
    • Replace in original text looks for the word in the original English texts and swaps it in the current text of every match.
    • Replace in translation looks only in texts you have already customised.
  3. Click Replace.

Replace works on parts of words too: replacing ad would also change “add”, “address” and “download”. Use whole, distinctive words, run a Search for the result afterwards, and fix anything that came out wrong. Do the plural (“listings”) separately if it needs a different word.

Edit texts on the site itself: the live translator

The live translator lets you change wording while you look at your site, without searching the list.

  1. Sign in to your site as an administrator, moderator or translator.
  2. On your site (not the admin panel), open your account menu and, under Live translator, click Enable.
  3. Move the mouse over the text you want to change. Texts you can edit are underlined, and an edit box opens when you point at one. Type the new wording and confirm.
  4. When you are done, open the menu again and click Disable.

The live translator changes the text in the language you are viewing, for that exact text everywhere it appears. It works on the page where you enabled it: after you go to another page, enable it again. Not every text on every theme can be edited this way; anything you can’t reach is in Settings › Translations.

Give someone the translator role to let them translate your texts and pages without access to your settings, users or listings. See Roles and permissions.

Languages available

The All languages list shows every language Yclas has, about 45 of them, by name and code. The code is a language plus a country, for example es_ES for Spanish (Spain), pt_BR for Portuguese (Brazil) or fr_FR for French. You need these codes for multilingual sites.

Translations come from the Yclas community and some are more complete than others. Texts that haven’t been translated yet show in English: search for them in Edit texts and fill them in yourself.

If your language isn’t in the list, contact support.

Make your site feel local

Language is one part of serving a local audience. These settings help too:

Updated 16 October 2026 · Suggest an edit