Translate Me

In an effort to fully embrace internationalization in the WordPress community, I launched a campaign this morning called Translate Me.

See, I released a new plugin this week, Support Me, which aims to drastically simplify the process of creating – and later removing – temporary user accounts for support purposes.

Support Me is unique in that it is the first of my plugins to leverage the amazing and massive community of translators over at translate.wordpress.org. Language packs are served to Support Me users on-demand, meaning I don’t need to generate and ship translation files with the plugin; I simply internationalize my plugin as usual, then register the text domain in the plugin header and it just works. Amazing.

In honor of French being the first language at 100% for my Support Me plugin, I’ll be using WP en français today. Thanks @fxbernard!

— Drew Jaynes (@DrewAPicture) July 29, 2016

The concept behind Translate Me is simple: For every locale team that 100 percent translates Support Me, I will use WordPress in that language – where feasible – for an entire day.

Since French (France) was the first team to reach 100 percent completion, I’ve been using WordPress in French all day today. I can definitely tell you it has proven to be a worthy challenge of my familiarity with WordPress admin interfaces, mostly because I don’t speak French!

Bonus points go out to the third-party translators who’ve translated strings for AffiliateWP – the plugin I work on full-time. The French translation appears to be quite complete!

Progress So Far

As of this writing, Support Me has already been 100 percent translated for six locales:

• English (UK) – Gary Jones (@GaryJ)
• French (France) – François-Xavier Bénard (@fxbenard)
• German – Bego Mario Garde (@pixolin)
• German (Formal) – Bego Mario Garde (@pixolin)
• Italian – Paolo Valenti (@wolly)
• Russian – Sergey Biryukov (@SergeyBiryukov)

Moar since this was originally posted:

• Hebrew – Rami Yushuvaev (@ramiy)
• Japanese – Naoko Takano (@nao)
• Nepali – Nilambar Sharma (@rabmalin)

Either way, it looks like I’ll be experiencing a lot of multilingual WordPress in the next few days once I pick up the campaign again on Monday morning. So far the schedule looks like this:

• Monday: English (UK)
• Tuesday: German (Formal in the afternoon)
• Wednesday: Russian
• Thursday: Italian
• Friday: Hebrew
• Monday: Japanese
• Tuesday: Nepali
• Wednesday: Your language? 😍

As more languages are completed, I’ll continue to add days. The goal is to promote the idea of community translation and ensure credit is given where it’s due. And to be honest, I’m kind of looking forward to the completion of an RTL language; that should be an interesting day!

Press the Words

With future days’ languages still up for grabs, it’s a great opportunity to start contributing to WordPress through translation.

If you’re a speaker of any language and have previously been hesitant to contribute to WordPress for fear that you don’t know how to code or design or whathaveyou, the Translation team can very likely use your help! With upward of 150 active locales, there’s something for just about everyone. Check it out!

Side note: As of WordPress 4.6, plugins and themes hosted and served from WordPress.org will no longer need to load their respective text domains, more on that on make/core.