WordPress Translation Day is back! This free and virtual event is welcome to anyone who would like to contribute to translations to WordPress, its themes, and plugins.

This year, the event is scheduled for the whole month of September, with local meetups and online sessions, sprints, and workshops organized by different teams.

Want to take part? Head to the WordPress Translation Day website to participate in the scheduled events, get in touch with the polyglot community, and see how you can contribute to WordPress in your language!

WordPress Translation Day is a great opportunity to connect with other WordPress users and enthusiasts in your language.

In addition to the events listed on the WordPress Translation Day webpage, you can also participate by:

• Contributing translations on translate.wordpress.com
• Joining the WordPress core polyglot community
• Translating plugin or theme content on translate.wordpress.org
• Helping keep the Gutenberg plugin translated in your language
• Working on translations for core block patterns

No contribution is too small! We hope you participate! Don’t forget to share what you’re working on! Feel free to Tweet about your translation using #WPTranslationDay as your hashtag.

We have had a great year on translate.wordpress.com. We’d like to take some time to look back our translation community’s achievements in 2019 and to thank everyone who contributed. Whether you have translated just one string or over a thousand strings, we are grateful for your contribution. Everything helps!

In 2019, 1,431 community volunteers translated 57,219 strings into 109 languages, resulting in 262,760 translations.

Thank you for your contributions this year! It’s thanks to you that we can make WordPress.com and our other services available to people speaking different languages around the world. We know that it’s not always easy to find time to contribute and provide translations of English strings in your language, so thank you for your sharing your skills and hard work with us and other users.

This next year, we will be working on some exciting new developments on our translation tools that will hopefully help your translation workflow! We will share these new developments as they are available.

Notable mentions for 2019

We want to highlight the work of a few notable volunteers. Each of these contributors contributed at least 2000 translations in the last year!

• Parvez Qadir for continuing to translate a large number of strings into Saraiki.
• Bujku for helping translate strings for WooCommerce and WordPress.com into Albanian and continuously.
• Dan Caragea for always keeping WordPress.com in Romanian 100% translated.
• Ken Ken for his devotion to bringing WordPress.com to users in Hong Kong.
• Fredrik for contributing to Swedish translations on WordPress.com and WooCommerce.
• Mub.artist for helping with Saraiki translations.
• justina33 for contributing Lithuanian translations to many themes, as well as to the WordPress.com project.
• Amreen for delighting Urdu bloggers and site builders
• Pavel Vondra for helping make WordPress.com available to Czech users.
• The Polytonic Project for their continued passion in preserving Polytonic Greek language and keeping it alive through WordPress.com.

Locales with most volunteer activity

Here are the top 10 locales of 2019:

1. Saraiki
2. Albanian
3. Romanian
4. Swedish
5. Hong Kong Chinese
6. Bulgarian
7. Korean
8. Urdu
9. Latvian
10. Norwegian

Get involved

Would you like to be part of the translation community? Head over to translate.wordpress.com to find out how you can get started.

Current community translators can also request to become validators. Find out more in the FAQs.

Fireworks icon credit: EmojiOne

In an increasingly global world, the work of translators and interpreters serves an ever more important role in connecting people across the globe. Translators help create equality of access across a number of domains including: technology, medicine, education, and culture. Translation breaks down barriers and brings people together.

WordPress‘s goal is to empower people, no matter what language they speak or where they live, to create a website, a blog, or an app – a livelihood. Translation makes this possible. Without the hard work of our vibrant community of translators, WordPress would not be available in as many languages.

In honor of International Translation Day, we would like to take this opportunity to thank all the translators that have contributed translations to WordPress.com and the WordPress open source project. To our wonderful and diverse community of WordPress translators: we couldn’t do it without you!

* To contribute translations to WordPress.com or the WordPress open source project, please see some additional links below:

• Getting Started with WordPress.com Translation
• Translate WordPress

In 2018, 1,987 WordPress.com community volunteers contributed 66,343 strings in 104 languages, bringing the total number of translations to 247,800.

You all put in so much time and effort to make our service available to more users around the world. We know that it’s not always easy to translate English messages and labels to your language, so we want to thank you for your sharing your skills, creativity, and hard work with us and other users.

Notable mentions

We are so happy to see both new faces and veteran contributors, and want to highlight the work of a few notable volunteers.

• Parvez Qadir for leading the Saraiki translation project on WordPress.com
• Dan Caragea for his help with reporting several bugs and missing parts while keeping Romanian translation up-to-date
• Fredrik for bringing Swedish translation into higher active levels in the last year
• Armuti for delighting Chuvash bloggers and site builders
• Luciano Croce (Luçiâno Lóccy Crôxe) for contributing to the most number of locals (en-gb/fr-be/fr-ca/fr-ch/it/pt)
• justina33 for generously extending his Lithuanian translation efforts to Jetpack and WooCommerce projects
• Dandelion Sprout for perfecting Norwegian translation
• bujku for making Gravatar.com fully available in Albanian
• Ken Ken for providing translations of several WordPress.com themes in Chinese (Hong Kong)
• The Polytonic Project for their passion in preserving Polytonic Greek language and keeping it alive

Locales with most volunteer activity

Here are the top 10 movers of 2018:

1. Saraiki
2. Swedish
3. Romanian
4. French
5. English (UK)
6. Bulgarian
7. German
8. Spanish
9. Norwegian
10. Dutch

Get involved

Would you like to be part of the translation community? Head over to translate.wordpress.com to find out how you can get started.

Current community translators can also request to become validators. Find out more in the FAQs.

Fireworks icon credit: EmojiOne

While filters can be useful when translating, sometimes the filtered results are too large and don’t yield the results you were expecting. This would force you to scroll through several irrelevant strings to get to the right one.

We have now added the possibility to narrow down the scope of the search.

Under the “Term” field, you will see Term Scope options. Here you can choose whether you want to search for the term in the English Source (select Originals only) or the Translations (select Translations only). You can also search the context or string reference.

This can be used in many ways to improve your translation or validation workflow. For example, if you want to know how a feature name has been translated in your language, you can search for “originals only”. This will pull up every instance of the feature name. You can then check how it was translated across all strings in your language. If you want to change the translation of a term that has been translated inconsistently, you can filter for the “wrong” translation by “Translations only” and update the translation.

Have a look around! Try filtering for some terms or phrases. Maybe you will find other uses for the improved filters!

Placeholder tags have long been a pain point for translators and validators in GlotPress. If a placeholder appears in the source string, the exact same placeholder must appear in the translation. To enter these into your translations, you would previously have to copy the placeholder from the source string and paste it into the correct place in the translation or manually enter the placeholder into the translation.

Now you can add placeholders while translating by simply clicking on the placeholder from list below the translation field. The placeholder will automatically be placed where your cursor is located.

Placeholders that are missing from the translation are shown in red. Once you insert the placeholder into the translation, it will turn green.

With this new feature, you no longer have to worry about typos in the placeholder text or errors copying partial tags! Additionally, you can easily edit fuzzy strings when only the placeholders have changed. We hope this new feature is helpful to you!

In 2017 community volunteers contributed 69,089 strings in 109 languages, bringing the total number of translations to 299,374 – a 34% increase since 2016.

Thanks to their work translating labels, tooltips, settings, editor buttons, headings, help text, themes and hundreds of other categories over more than 30 projects, there are now more happy WordPress.com users than ever.

Notable mentions

All community volunteers deserve kudos/multiple hugs/pats on the back. Still, there are a few to whom we’d like to give a digital fist bump for being among our most active contributors this year.

1. armuti for giving 1.6 million Chuvash speakers the gift of WordPress.com
2. Ken Ken for performing the Hong Kong/Taiwan Chinese double-whammy
3. Dandelion Sprout for devotion to the delightful Norwegian language
4. Dan Caragea: Romanian maintains its position as the most highly translated language of the year
5. gorskimoz, for whom countless speakers of Slovenian are grateful
6. justina33, who came out on top in the WordPress.com UI vs Lithuanian challenge
7. taqbaylitassa for enriching WordPress.com with exquisite Kabylian syllables
8. DelphiKnight for demonstrating great chivalry in Georgian. Thank you, O Knight!
9. Muhammad Farhan Danish, whose translations grace the screens of all Urdu-speaking users
10. వీవెన్, for the continuing contributions to Telugu, a language spoken by a whopping 75 million people!

Locales with the most activity

Here are the top 10 movers of 2017:

1. Chuvash
2. Norwegian
3. Chinese (Hong Kong)
4. Romanian
5. Slovenian
6. Urdu
7. Icelandic
8. Telugu
9. Lithuanian
10. Afrikaans

Thank you!

The amount of translations and projects is forever climbing, and so is the number of WordPress users who, in their own languages, are delivering new ideas to the universe.

To those we didn’t mention – you know who you are – we bow to you. Language is the bridge to a better internet and better world, and your work has a direct and positive impact on the experience of millions of bloggers. Thank you for helping us make WordPress.com awesome for everyone.

We wish you all a fabulous 2018. Here’s to an even more successful year of polyglotism.

The community needs you

Would you like to contribute your linguistic knowledge to the biggest blogging community humankind has ever known? Great! Head over to translate.wordpress.com to find out how you can get started.

Current community translators can also request to become validators. Find out more in the FAQs.

Locale Glossary

Building a robust glossary for your locale is crucial for a successful translation project. From now on, WordPress.com project validators can build a locale glossary shared across all translate.wordpress.com projects.

This means that translators no longer have to look up terms on the project glossary for WordPress.com while translating themes or any other projects.

Validators can start building their locale glossary by importing an existing set of terms and translations*. For more information, check out this documentation.

* If you had a project glossary for the WordPress.com project, we’ve already migrated it to a locale glossary. You can find the new location on this list.

Set Current Translation as Fuzzy

Have you had a time when you wanted to change the status of an already approved translation from “Current” to “Fuzzy” while validating? Now validators can click the “Fuzzy” button on a questionable translation to mark it as not Current and come back to it later.

Until a new translation is approved and set as Current, Fuzzy items will become untranslated after a translation deploy**.

** Translation deploys happens irregularly for all projects except for the themes, which has scheduled deploys once a day after a completion threshold is met.

Special Thanks

These updates were made possible by everyone who contributed the release of GlotPress 2.3, the open source software behind translate.wordpress.com. Thank you!

2016 was a busy year on translate.wordpress.com, the translation platform of Automattic projects. For the first time, we are sharing some stats about the past year.

Numbers of Translators, Translations, and Locales

3,250 community volunteers translated 61,676 strings into 107 languages, resulting in 225,806 translations.

Most active users

These top 10 translators suggested the most translations across all projects.

1. Dan Caragea (Romanian)
2. Vijaya Madhavi (Hindi)
3. Satnam S Virdi (Punjabi)
4. Mariozo (Latvian)
5. Manuela Silva (Portuguese/Portugal)
6. Muhammad Farhan Danish (Urdu)
7. Amreen (Urdu)
8. justina33 (Lithuanian)
9. gwgan (Welsh)
10. cubells (Catalan)

Most active locale teams

And congratulations to the locale teams that made the most progress this year.

1. Romanian
2. Hindi
3. Urdu
4. Latvian
5. Punjabi
6. Portuguese/Portugal
7. Italian
8. Icelandic
9. French
10. German

Number of active projects

translate.wordpress.com is not just for WordPress.com UI. Currently, there are 22 active projects (This number doesn’t include 399 WordPress.com themes).

We added 14 new WooCommerce-related projects this year.

We would like to thank everyone who helped us reach out to users around the world who speak languages other than English. Your effort makes it possible for more people to have a voice of their own.

We look forward to bringing you better support in translating WordPress.com and beyond this year!

Alex, Hew, Julian, Naoko, and Yoav of Team Global

But today, 98% of WordPress.com is translated to Romanian with the highest percentage than any other locales.

We were amazed to see the fast progress of the Romanian translation project and found out that Dan Caragea (dancarageact62) has been hard at work. On his own, he translated astonishing 23,613 strings this year. His contribution also includes WordPress.com themes and other projects.

I had a chance to ask Dan a few questions.

What made you decide to work on WordPress.com translation?

I noticed that Romanian WordPress.com translation project was stagnant for a while, even though it’s a platform very much used in my country. On the other hand, I realized that there are quite a few strings fetched directly from WordPress.com on my self-hosted WordPress site such as Jetpack related sections (I’m also one of Global Translation Editors of WordPress.org Romanian).

I began to translate on translate.wordpress.com but nobody validated my translations, so I asked to become a validator and started doing it alone.

Any tips you want to share with fellow translators?

No tips, just hard work, with a daily goal. It was maybe a personal bet: Romanian translation to have a share of over 90% by the end of year.

But to my joy, I reached the target earlier with a percentage that I never imagined when I started.

What do you use WordPress for?

Now I use a self-hosted WordPress for my blog.

We would like to congratulate Dan for achieving an impressive milestone. He inpired us by showing that dedicated hard work and setting small (daily) goals can make a big difference over time.

Would you like to help us translate WordPress.com into your language? Learn how to get started!