September is here, and so too is the opportunity to share with you what’s next in the Polyglots community…The seventh edition of WordPress Translation Day! And it’s just around the corner, 28th September to be exact. 

This month brings together the entire Polyglots community worldwide to learn, cooperate and celebrate translation, and let’s not forget, to have a great time together and the WordPress Translation Day. 

What is WordPress Translation Day

So if you’ve never heard of WordPress Translation Day, you might be asking yourself, what’s it all about? Well, it’s like a Contributor Day, but with a single enormous Polyglots table, 12.742.000 meters wide to be precise!

The day marks a global online event with numerous local meetups that join together to learn, contribute, and make the WordPress ecosystem accessible to people who don’t speak English.

The event dates back to April 24th, 2016, when the first WordPress Global Translation Day took place. It was so successful that it was quickly repeated on November 12th that same year, named Global World Translation Day 2.

The original idea was to dedicate 1 full day to bringing WordPress to more people around the world, with a 24-hour event full of live training sessions on WordPress i18n & L10n.

Fast Forward to 2017 and the United Nations declared September 30th the International Translation Day, an opportunity to pay tribute to the work of language professionals, which plays an important role in bringing nations together, facilitating dialogue, understanding and cooperation, contributing to the development and strengthening world peace and security.

The WordPress Global Translation Day organizers decided to create their event on the same day and the team prepared WordPress Translation Day 3. Notice the slight event name change (since that day it has remained unchanged as the #WPTranslationDay).

The event started to get bigger each year and on May 9th, 2019 WordPress Translation Day 4 was no exception.

By that time the growing organizers team acknowledged that the global Polyglots 24-hour event format across all time zones was unsustainable, too endurance-focused, heavy-paced, and hard to follow with a happy mind. 

Because of that, the event changed from an intense single day to a whole month, with global events and many local mini-events distributed across September. The WPTD 5 (2020) and WPTD 6 (2021) editions allowed the local communities to choose the best approach and time to gather and promote their local meetups.

What to expect in 2022

So back to this year’s edition which is scheduled for September 28th. Its format will be the same as last year, the communities organize their local events across the whole month, a few global events, and a live stream to recap the celebration. 

As we get closer to the date, be sure to keep an eye on the Polyglots blog and participate in the weekly meetings on the WordPress Slack #polyglots channel. 

If you’re interested in promoting one of these local events, check out this Translation Day discussion recap about the online and in-person event’s preparation and how to get any community support you might need for streaming your online events.

If you’re keen to participate yourself, be sure to show up and gather with your local translation community, no special knowledge is required.

And, if you’re an experienced translator, you can promote a translation meetup in your area, welcoming and mentoring new users on your local translation style guides and rules!

What you give and what you get

Where do I fit in? My story with the WordPress Portuguese Community started back in WordCamp Lisboa in 2015. I was looking for help translating a theme and some plugins into Portuguese, by that time the platform Translating WordPress was going through massive improvements, and I inevitably got hooked on WordPress i18n and l10n. 

Since then, I’ve been contributing to the core and the whole ecosystem translation, thanks to my dear friend Álvaro!

So why take part in WordPress Translation? Adopting the translation of a theme or a plugin you use is a win-win situation: you get a complete understanding of how it works, and you provide others in your local community with a well-curated translation. 

Hook yourself in polyglots. 2022’s edition is going to be a good one!