Today, content management for individuals, groups, and companies has become a lot easier thanks to hosting services such as WordPress. Whether they want the application on the web or installed on their local computer, the system provides a hassle-free and cheap way to manage content. The Japanese, who use an enormous amount of information in their virtual communication, will definitely find WordPress interesting.
WordPress, like every other website, is built on a platform that caters to a mostly English-speaking audience. The language barrier between the East and the West make it quite difficult for non-English speaking audiences to adapt to its features. In order to gain a wider reach, WordPress has introduced different versions and languages of its service.
WordPress in Japanese
Japanese WordPress was introduced in the year 2003, a few months after the release of its parent site. The large Japanese WordPress community was primarily responsible for anticipating the need and importance of WordPress in the non-English speaking world. A mark of the Japanese work culture, the community organized a systematic translation and documentation process that led to its rapid growth. Today, besides Japanese, WordPress supports more than 80 non-English languages, thus, expanding its repertoire across the globe.
How to install Japanese WordPress
Installing and updating WordPress is quite easy and fast. In just a matter of clicks, you can have a fully functional site. Before installing WordPress, make sure the system meets its minimum requirements.
- To install the Japanese version, download a WordPress copy from https://ja.wordpress.org/. It is a zipped copy no larger than 9 MB.
- Unzip the copy and go to the location: wordpress wp-content languages. It consists of all the Japanese language files you need.
- Use the same location address and create it in your installation. Copy the language files from the old location to the newly created one.
- Open the file wp-config.php in Notepad or any text editor. You can see numerous lines of code from which you have to find the line,
- define (‘WPLANG’, ‘’);
As you should have guessed this is the line that defines the language in which you want to use WordPress. For Japanese, change it to, define (‘WPLANG’, ‘ja’); - Save the file after changing the language code. Now the complete interface is available in Japanese.
What is different?
In the Japanese version of WordPress, the time zone is automatically taken as Tokyo. The language, of course, is Japanese. Apart from this, there are no major differences between the Japanese and English versions of the application.
