Can all Gutenberg blocks be translated? | Gato Plugins for WordPress

Gato AI Translations for Polylang translates all the blocks from the WordPress core out of the box, and supports integrating custom and 3rd-party blocks.

Any new block can be supported as long as it exposes the strings to translate in a relatively straightforward way. And that is not always the case.

The Yoast SEO blocks (Yoast How-to and Yoast FAQ) provide a good example. These blocks are supported for simple strings only:

Strings containing HTML tags (including links, images, HTML styles like strong or italic, new lines, etc.) are not supported:

That’s because of how that data is stored by the Yoast blocks, containing a mix of strings and JSON with nested properties:

Which looks like this:

{
    "question": [
        "L'émergence d'études plus récentes sur le collagène marin tendent à montrer qu'il possède des qualités biologiques très favorables",
        {
            "type": "sup",
            "props": {
                "children": [
                    {
                        "type": "a",
                        "props": {
                            "href": "#bibliographie",
                            "children": [
                                "5"
                            ]
                        }
                    }
                ]
            }
        },
        "•",
        {
            "type": "br",
            "props": {
                "children": [
                    1
                ]
            }
        },
        {
            "type": "br",
            "props": {
                "children": [
                    1
                ]
            }
        },
        "De plus, l'extraction du collagène marin permet d'exploiter et de valoriser les sous-produits de l'industrie de transformation du poisson voués à la perte. Par ailleurs, le collagène marin présente des avantages par rapport au collagène bovin : moins de risque de transmission de maladie et aucune considération religieuse",
        {
            "type": "sup",
            "props": {
                "children": [
                    {
                        "type": "a",
                        "props": {
                            "href": "#bibliographie",
                            "children": [
                                "6"
                            ]
                        }
                    }
                ]
            }
        },
        ". ",
        {
            "type": "br",
            "props": {
                "children": []
            }
        },
        {
            "type": "br",
            "props": {
                "children": []
            }
        },
        "Néanmoins, les équipes de recherche ne sont pas unanimes sur l'efficacité de l'un par rapport à l'autre. Ce d'autant que plusieurs facteurs peuvent affecter la manière dont le collagène est assimilé."
    ],
    "jsonQuestion": "\u003cstrong\u003eQuel est le meilleur collagène : marin ou bovin ?\u003c/strong\u003e"
}

The plugin can’t send the whole JSON structure to the AI service, as we can't be confident that it will interpret it correctly. It also can’t extract the strings to translate as send only those, as we don't know what those properties are within the JSON structure (eg: sometimes children, but sometimes not).`

In addition, the Yoast blocks store the same information 3 times (properties answer and jsonAnswer, and also the text inside the rendered HTML content) with different formats, and their translations must match, or the Gutenberg editor will show an error on that block. That is not really feasible to achieve.

Therefore, the plugin only supports simple strings for these blocks.