Stoat is translation-ready: every string the theme prints goes through WordPress’s translation functions under the text domain stoat, and the theme ships a stoat.pot template in languages/ with 265 strings in it.
What gets translated
Only the theme’s own words. There are not many:
- Skip to the content, Skip to the main menu
- Search, Open menu, Menu
- Previous, Next, Posts navigation, Page %d
- Nothing found, That page could not be found. Try a search instead.
- Search results for: %s
- Tags:, (more), By %s, Powered by Owldraft
- Every Customizer label and description
Your posts, pages, menus, categories and widget text are content, not theme strings. Translating those is a different job — see A multilingual site below.
The three routes
1. Your language already has a translation. Set Settings → General → Site Language and WordPress downloads it. Community translations live on translate.wordpress.org; if yours is complete, this is all you do.
2. Translate it yourself in the browser. Install Loco Translate and work through the strings from your dashboard. This is the practical answer for most people.
3. Translate it yourself in a desktop app. Poedit, against the .pot file. See .po and .mo files.
Contribute it back
If you translate Stoat into your language, the kindest thing you can do next is submit it at translate.wordpress.org. Once approved, everyone using that language gets it automatically and nobody else has to do the work again.
A multilingual site
Running one site in several languages is a plugin’s job — Polylang, WPML, TranslatePress. They handle post and page translation, the language switcher and the URL structure; the theme’s own strings still come from the .mo file above.
If you add a language switcher, the two natural homes for it in Stoat are the social menu area of the header (as a menu item) and a footer widget.