Unlocking Multilingual Menus: How to Make Your WordPress Full-Site-Editing Navigation Translatable with Polylang!

Polylang is a fantastic tool for creating multilingual WordPress sites, but it isn’t fully integrated with Full Site Editing (FSE) and Block themes. The traditional WordPress menus are absent in FSE and have been replaced with navigation blocks linked to wp_navigation posts. While Polylang offers some compatibility with FSE, the removal of classic menu functionality leaves users without a straightforward solution for translating navigation content. Additionally, navigation content is stored only in the database, making it impossible to embed directly in the theme’s code translating through WordPress’s native internationalization (i18n) features.

Making the navigation menus of a WordPress site translatable with the Polylang plugin can be achieved in just fifty lines of code. Here’s a step-by-step guide.