I have plenty of customizations on a page which was only meant to be used for german audience – hence I hardcoded the some German sentences directly into the functions.php whereever I had language output.
Now the website shall be translated and make usable for different languages.
So I thought to simply replace any hardcoded german string like this:
# Before
echo 'Das ist mein Text';
# After:
echo __('Das ist mein Text', 'theme-functions-translation');
But now the questions is:
This would work in case there are no po/mo files yet and the homepage setting is still set to German. BUT doesn’t wordpress assume that these source/base strings ('Das ist mein Text') are english?
Or can I simply add a language file, e.g. es_ES.mo, and than add the translation with Das ist mein Text as a base and spanish as a target? Will it care which is the base language, or doesn’t it matter as it’s a direct mapping anyhow?
Thanks so much!