The sixth edition of WordPress Translation Day was a success thanks to the efforts of many community translators across the globe.
For the past few years, we have celebrated International Translation Day through a series of events under the banner of WordPress Translation Day. These events are used to highlight the importance of polyglot contributions to the WordPress project, and to introduce new contributors to translating WordPress.
In 2021, the WordPress Translation Day organizing team and local translation organizers came together to celebrate translations during the entire month of September. This included 22 local events, six global events (in English), and multiple asynchronous sprints, discussions, and other projects for translators to join and share tips.
Local Events
During the month of September 2021, more than 20 different language communities organized local WordPress Translation Day celebrations. In each of these celebrations, translators came together to share their experiences with new contributors, suggest and review translations, and, in more than one case, release a new WordPress package! WordPress Translation Day is jointly organized with the Polyglots and Marketing Team and supported by many other Contributor Teams.
Some of the initiatives during 2021:
- the French locale organized a quiz about WordPress translation, with gifts for the three highest scorers
- the Indonesian locale held a translation marathon for the entire month of September
- WordPress core translations for the Kannada locale went from 31% to 100%, resulting in a release of WordPress 5.8 in Kannada
- the Thai locale completed 90% of translations for WordPress 5.8, resulting in another package release
Global events
From September 17 to September 30, 2021, the global WordPress Translation Day organizing team put together a series of global events in English. These included six live events, ranging from hangouts with translation-based trivia to panels on tools for Polyglots.
Additional contributor teams also organized sprints to help celebrate WordPress Translation Day and the impact of translations throughout the WordPress project.
- The Community team hosted a Community Documentation and Translation Sprint that resulted in Community team information being translated into three different locales. It also launched two new pages (in English) for the Community Handbook: 2021: Returning to in-person WordCamps and In-person WordCamp decision checklist!
- The Training team hosted a sprint to upload and translate subtitles for Learn WordPress with more than a dozen participants joining to help in the effort. During the sprint, 48 out of 53 videos were captioned, and subtitles were uploaded in both Spanish and Japanese.
Global live-streaming events included:
- an introduction to WordPress translation, including a presentation from Polyglots Global Mentor, Petya Raykovska, on the status of WordPress translations.
- Polyglots contributors and developers – Vlad Timotei, Jesús Amieiro, Vibgy Joseph, and Peter Smits – presented in the Panel on Polyglots Tools to share their experience as translation contributors, the tools they’ve helped to build, and other pro-tips for improving translation speed and consistency.
- in the Panel on Open Source Translation Communities, experienced Polyglots contributors – Ali Darwich and Zé Fontainhas – joined translation contributors Michal Stanke, from Mozilla, and Satomi Tsujita, from Hyperledger Fabric. Together, they shared their experience translating for open source communities, why they started, and how their communities are organized to create quality translations for their projects.
In the finale event for WordPress Translation Day 2021, local organizers from eight locales shared their experiences, expertise, and the highlights of this year’s translation celebrations. The transmission was chaired by Abha Thakor and joined by polyglots Tor-Bjorn Fjellner, Olga Gleckler, Pooja Derashri, Jean-Baptiste Audras, Hari Shanker, Devin Maeztri, and Suresha N. Meher Bala and Yogesh Londhe helped to support this event across a variety of platforms for everyone to interact and celebrate together.
Polyglots Appreciation
Organizing WordPress Translation Day gives us an opportunity to celebrate both the importance of translation and to highlight the impact of translation contributors on the WordPress project and community!
As part of the celebrations, the 2021 events included a Call for Nominations to highlight Polyglots who have made a significant contribution to encourage others to contribute.
We received a total of 35 nominations for contributors around the world who have had an impact in their local communities, and in the global WordPress project.
Follow the WordPress Translation Day social media channels to read more features in the coming months.
The impact
During the WordPress Translation Day global events, the project benefited from:
- 733,583 string suggestions
- 518,710 strings approved *
- 1,908 active translation contributors participated, including
- 697 new translation contributors
- 1,211 existing translation contributors who took part
- 11 new translation editors, including both project-specific and general translation editors
- 6 new package releases, for a total of 67 locales with WordPress package releases
- more than a dozen contributors joined the Training team’s captioning and subtitling sprint, including both first-time and Five for the Future contributors
- 48 out of 53 videos were captions, and translated into two different locales (Spanish and Japanese)
- seven documents were translated into three different languages (Indonesian, Spanish, and Traditional Chinese) during the Community team’s documentation sprint
- more than 700 views on the live-streamed, global events (during the month)
- 20+ pieces of video content for editing for longer use
- increase in engagement and reach across all the WordPress Translation Day social media channels and support to marketing at local events. Reach and follower numbers increase across channels
- news stories on WordPress.org and wider and follow-up content and interviews planned
- ongoing campaign to share “I am a Translator” banner
This impact builds on the success of last year’s WordPress Translation Day events, which spanned four weeks. During the first week – between September 27 to October 4, 2020 – there were a total of 1,006 unique translation contributors who translated 17,5683 strings on the translate.wordpress.org platform.
* By default, a translation is suggested and must be approved by a translation editor before appearing live. A string may be rejected because it doesn’t fit the locale’s glossary or other, similar guidelines.
Thank you
WordPress Translation Day would not be possible without the hard work of many tireless volunteers. Every person on the WordPress Translation Day global organizing team, every local event organizer, and every person who contributed translations to WordPress – even if it was just one string – should be proud of their contribution. Efforts like these help to make WordPress more accessible to the 75% of the web that do not speak English as their native language.
Want to keep the WordPress Translation Day celebrations going? You can help to translate WordPress and its related projects any time.
- Learn how to get started translating WordPress.
- Chat with other translators in the #polyglots channel in the Making WordPress Slack.
- Sign-up to get monthly Polyglots news in your inbox.
- Help edit and subtitle this year’s and previous WordPress Translation Day videos in the #marketing Slack channel.
- Follow and share on the #WPTranslationDay social channels.
- Watch the Polyglots team blog to help organize WordPress Translation Day next year.
This post was written and created by: Erica Varlese, Abha Thakor, Meher Bala, Larissa Murillo, Hari Shanker, Pantip Treerattanapitak, Yogesh Londhe, and Meher Bala.