WordPress Translation Day… A summary 

On September 28th the worldwide Polyglots Team reunited for another yearly party around the WordPress translation ecosystem. Throughout the whole month, there were global events, local meetups, and multiple team accomplishments that were celebrated!

I’ve rounded up exactly what went on at WordPress Translation Day and I invite you to read the separate blog roundups I’ve linked. 

Global events

There were global events set in different time zones to ensure everyone around the globe could take part, with two key themes covered:

• Introduction to WordPress Translation for newcomers and communities
• A walk through the new Feedback Tool for translators and editors to communicate (now published on WordPress.tv)

You can check out some of the photos from the meeting and stats of the event on the team recap post.

Another global event was held by the Training Team, with this year's main focus being the translation of LearnWP content. 

With a total of 30 attendees, the volunteers translated a full lesson plan into Serbian, Italian, and Spanish, with plans for Hindi and German being completed imminently. 

See the team recap post for more info.

Local events

Many local teams shared their accomplishments, including the Italian, Bulgarian, Nepali, Yorùbá, Bahasa Indonesia, Japanese, and Greek teams, with an impressive 13 local events in 11 different languages and across four continents. 

And, they shared some impressive stats following this year’s WordPress Translation Day:

• Locales with a Core package release: 71 (+1)
• Active translators: 16,765 (+720)
• GTEs: 715 (+5)
• PTEs: 5,120 (+24) 
• Unique plugin packs: 3,933 (+5)
• Unique theme packs: 1,703 (+1)
• Feedback tool users: 139 (+19)
• Original strings with comments: 20,197 (+12,277)
• Total comments: 33,822 (+19,942)

Check out more highlights of the event on the team recap post.

On a more personal note, the Portuguese Community also had a small translation meetup. 

We added some new glossary terms to the translation platform, tested the new GlotPress Feedback Tool, and discussed the PTE onboarding for the Portuguese community. During September, we also made de effort to push both the WP core versions 5.9 and 6.0 to 100%, which were incomplete.

Again, you can find more details in the team meeting post.

Non-event internationalization contribution

So while WordPress Translation Day has been and gone, the internationalization of WordPress continues.

WordPress has a different behavior based on settings for each Locale. Some examples are the Text Direction (left-to-right or right-to-left), the type of Word Count Type that allows showing the word count on the post editor stats, and much more. These are set on the Translating WordPress tables, per Locale.

Many Locales have these settings wrong, I wrote a blog post to highlight the problem with the Word Count Type setting, and to make it easy for the Locale teams to fix it. After this was brought to the light, many settings were immediately fixed, which was awesome!

Immediately it came to my mind that many other settings could be wrong, and unfortunately there’s no way to quickly check them out globally.

Well, there wasn’t! So I gathered some of these settings, with many still to come, and published a stats page where all of these settings are highlighted. Check out the WP-i18n Stats about the Locales and Languages Settings.

Language settings history for all Locales

The above graph shows the benefit of bringing this to light, after sharing the post on September 7th many settings were fixed, as well as after the WPTranslationDay on September 28th.

This was part of my contribution to this year's #WPTranslationDay, I hope it’s useful to keep the WordPress i18n clean and healthy.

So, that was a quick summary of what happened at this year’s WordPress Translation Day - I hope if you didn’t manage to take part we’ll see you in 2023!