How to make multi store view sharing same translation?

Question

I have a default website in Magento and only one store, but I had to create a new store view, which will share everything, except layout that will be different, it's just to publicize another brand of same company. I duplicated the template, layout and skin folders in order to work around the newest store view, but some words I translated before are being shown different, e.g below:

In default store view, I changed "Regular Price" to "was" and "Special Price" to "now", so, on the product page we can see "was $99 now $79". However, after creating a new store view in admin, I'm seing the old default text "Regular Price: $99 Special Price: $79" instead of "was $99 now $79".

How to use exactly the same locale for multiple store views? The locale (translation) needs always to be the same doesn't matter the store view.

Any help?

Answer 1

Are you familiar with magento's theme enheritance? You don't have to duplicate everything, you can make a sub-theme and add the files which are different. Magento will automatically fallback to default or base when a necessary file isn't there. This is very ideal if you want to be able to update easilier. I think this will also solve your translation issue as it falls back to the default translation, an example. your theme could be like,

app/design/frontend/{themename}/{subthemename} skin/frontend/{themename}/{subthemename}

These are the defaults path. By default magento has the themes, base, default and rwd. Underneath that there's always a folder called default so: default, default. Magento automatically falls back to default. So if i want to make a sub-theme with a little change on for example the default theme, i can make a folder called "mytheme" underneath default and place all changed files there, just the changed becouse magento will look for default if something misses. If something misses in default it will check base.

So make a subtheme, place all changed things there and let magento do the rest. You can configure what to use in your shop under system->design or under system->configuration->design.

Excuse me i'm a hurry but i wanted to answer your question. If you have any doubts or problems pleasy reply with your theme directory structure so i could help you out on setting this up. Goodluck :)