Celebrating Our WordPress.com Rockstar Translators
Today, let’s hear it for the volunteers who translate WordPress.com into dozens of languages. Bonus: if you want to get involved, learn about our new glossary feature!
WordPress.com is a community of diverse bloggers. We realize this every day when we read posts covering so many different topics.
Our community is strikingly diverse in other important ways. Did you know that almost a third of the people visiting our blogs are reading non-English posts and pages — content written in more than 100 other languages?
We are truly lucky to have so many translation volunteers — users who’ve been passionately translating WordPress.com since we launched our first community translation platform in 2006. With their collective effort, thousands of strings and millions of words have been translated into dozens of languages.
Why do you contribute?
We recently asked our top translation contributors what motivates them to help out with this important work.
Many of them named the collaborative spirit around WordPress.com as the main reason. Mariano Pérez, from Spain, summarized it very simply: “Community, community, community.”
Sekander Badsha, from Bangladesh, says he just really enjoys translating WordPress.com:
Translating open source projects is my hobby. The thing that most inspired me to translate is my local people. WordPress.com is one of the major platforms we Bangladeshi people use.
Kobus (snapalot) from South Africa wrote:
It’s a big task and responsibility translating into Afrikaans. It’s great to set the standard for my language and develop new and fun terms and phrases for blogging. There’s no greater sense of contribution for me.
We were happy to hear this comment by Arno Boerman from Netherlands:
I just love being able to help — even in a small way — make WordPress better. It is just such a great product.
German translation contributor Martin looks at the bigger picture:
I strongly believe in democratizing publishing. By translating WordPress.com, you lower the entry threshold for everyone else and put people who don’t speak English — it’s 73% of the web according to the stats — in a position to start blogging and sharing their knowledge and experiences. This is what makes me happy as a translator.
Other rockstars who chimed in include Anderson Lima, lilmaouz, Bobby, Julien, Xoshbin Ali, Zé, Diana K. Cury, Ravi, Nanna919, Veeven, Laszlo Espadas, Mushviq Abdulla, Milla, Torsten Landsiedel (zodiac1978), and Christian.
To all the translators who have ever contributed their time and talent to WordPress.com, thank you very much for your help!
Introducing a new glossary feature
Anyone involved in translating knows how important it is to use terms consistently in order to maintain the quality of translation. We want to make sure that you have the right tool for this, so we’re thrilled to announce the addition of a new glossary feature to the GlotPress translation platform.
When a word or a phrase in a string exists in the glossary of your language, you will see a dotted line. You can hover over it to see a suggested translation, as well as a description (if one’s available).
To view a full list of current glossary items, click the “Glossary” link that appears on the top-right corner of each translation screen. If you’re a validator of the language, you can add, edit, and delete glossary entries.
Interested in translating WordPress.com?
We’re always happy to welcome new translation volunteers. You can read a bit about our translation process, start suggesting translations in your language on GlotPress, or check out some translation resources we’ve put together.
Happy translating!
- March 11, 2014
- Community, International, Language, Localization, Translation
WordPress.com News 
The Greek writing looks great!! Excited 🙂
LikeLike
Glad to hear that!
LikeLike
Holding a degree in translation this is a great way to practice and have fun at the same time! Definitely inspired and already working on translations into Slovak.
LikeLike
Great point, I agree translating WordPress.com is great learning experience that is also fun. Thank you for your help!
LikeLike
I would love to understand this service a bit better. I have visitors from over 90 countries to my blog and I write only in English – so I feel frequent regret that people seeking information might have that barrier. But it sounds like they might not. Can you explain more how it works and if there is anything I can do to maximize this benefit?
warmly, marcy
LikeLike
Hi Marcy,
It’s amazing that you have a wide audience coming from so many countries.
Our translation system lets users translate interface languages (e.g. admin screens, text contained in theme files) only. For more information, please visit our Translation FAQ page.
https://wordpress.com/support/translation-faq/
LikeLike
Is there a way to find blogs written in other languages? For example, I am studying Arabic and would be interested in trying read in that language.
LikeLike
If you have your WordPress.com account language set to Arabic, you can use WordPress.com Reader to enter tags: http://ar.wordpress.com/tag/culture/
(We are currently working on non-ascii text to work on that page, but currently tags for the Reader page has to be spelled with English alphabets)
While you’re logged out of WordPress.com, you can also browse a language specific tag cloud: http://ar.wordpress.com/tags/
All available languages can be found here: http://wordpress.com/languages/
Hope that helps!
LikeLike
Thank you.
LikeLike
Indeed all these volunteers are to be commended and congratulated and cheered and …I’ve run out of relevant verbs beginning with ‘c’ .. 🙂
LikeLike
Kudos to these skilled volunteers! I didn’t know about their work..but then I read, speak and write in mainly 1 language…with lousy fluency in 2 others.
LikeLike
I translate during my free time and it’s a lot of work. So kudos for the contributors! Korean looks great!
LikeLiked by 1 person
Gold Medals to all the volunteer translators. .
LikeLike
As WordPress builds its tools and templates and adds translation and other features, it adds to its attractiveness as a developer-friendly and consumer-friendly framework. Today’s WordPress developers can leverage the flexibility of the features and functionality, and the plug-ins and other tools to create simple or complex sites to satisfy every need. At Elegant MicroWeb, we find that our customers are more familiar with WordPress today and are anxious to learn about the possibilities WordPress offers. Great translation support is another plus!
LikeLike