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 an empty box on the right. 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 Translator 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.
  • Emptying a box doesn’t bring the original back. To undo a change, type the original text again (use Copy text) and save.

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 Original looks for the word in the original English texts and swaps it in the current text of every match.
    • Replace 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 7 October 2026 · Suggest an edit