Category: polyglots

WordPress’ Polyglots team has published the first edition of a new monthly newsletter aimed at helping contributors stay informed and engaged with the team’s activities.

WordPress has been translated by volunteers for more than 15 years since version 1.2, with the earliest contributions from the Hindi, French, Japanese, and Norwegian communities. Since that time the Polyglots team has grown to include the work of 55,427 translation contributors. They have also adopted more efficient tools like P2 and Slack to stay connected, but some translators find it difficult to follow the constant stream of posts and meetings.

The monthly newsletter was launched to provide a short-format digest of all the significant happenings and discussions in the translation community. It will include news related to upcoming releases and Polyglots tools, condensed so contributors don’t have to keep a close eye on the team’s P2 blog, Slack channels, or RSS feed.

The first edition features a brief summary of the month-long WordPress Translation Day 2021 event, which brought in 697 new translation contributors. Altogether the contributor teams submitted 518,710 approved translation strings during 22 local and six livestream events.

The majority of people using WordPress are using it with a translation. As of October 2021, 55.36% of WordPress sites are running a translated site. That figure is slowly inching upward as WordPress adoption grows in the non-English speaking world.

Even if you’re not a member of the Polyglots team, this newsletter is a good way to stay up-to-date with the exciting frontier of WordPress translations. Subscribers can sign up to receive monthly Polyglots updates directly via email.

WordPress Translation Day kicked off today, and the event has been expanded to run from September 1-30 this year. WordPress Polyglots contributors from all over the world will be hosting mini-events throughout the month where they will be translating themes, plugins, apps, meta, docs, and other important projects. Events will also focus on recruitment, virtual training for new PTEs/GTEs, and general process improvements.

In the past, the event has been a boon for the Polyglots contributor base. In 2020, the teams hosted more than 20 local events, resulting in more than 175,000 strings translated. French, Spanish, and Japanese-language locales logged the most translated strings during the first week last year.

There are currently seven mini-events scheduled for 2021 in different locales throughout the month of September. From Portugal to Tehran to Jakarta, contributors are planning sprints to translate popular plugins and WordPress core. In Bengaluru, one of the largest IT hubs in India, organizers will be onboarding new translators, including high school students who are interested in contributing to WordPress.

WordPress Translation Day will also include some global events during the second half of the month. These events will be hosted in English and contributors of all experience levels are welcome to attend:

• Friday, September 17th (time to be announced): Introduction to WordPress Translation Day
• Sunday, September 19th at 12:00 UTC: Panel on Polyglots Tools
• Tuesday, September 21st at 11:00 UTC: Panel on Open Source Translation Communities
• Thursday, September 30th (time to be announced): Closing Party – Why do you translate?

Attendees will be able to participate live as the events are broadcasted on YouTube. The final session will recap the month’s events, highlight success stories, and will also include some activities and games.

This year translators are extending their volunteer efforts to some newer projects, including working with the Training Team to translate video workshops hosted on learn.wordpress.org, translating Community team resources, translating the Block Patterns project, and translating the Pattern Directory itself.

The global events combined with the local mini-events are essentially like a virtual Polyglots WordCamp held over the span of a month. Attendees will have opportunities to connect with other translators and team leaders and share their experiences contributing to WordPress. If you are new and thinking of joining the Polyglots team, check out the new Polyglots Training course on Learn WordPress.org to find out more about contributing.