Kenneth Lu (Web Publishing for All! Introducing Community Translator Tools
We’re excited to announce new tools that help make WordPress even more accessible to people around the globe.
Publishing tools for everyone
Roughly half of the content and traffic on the internet is in English1, yet English is the mother tongue of only about a quarter of internet users2, and less than 5% of the world’s population.3 We believe that WordPress.com should be for everyone, not just English speakers — it’s why we already serve WordPress in 131 languages — but we want to make it even more accessible.4
To keep so many languages up to date we need to make it radically easier for non-English speaking communities to help with translation. We’re proud to announce our latest step in that direction: the Community Translator.
Introducing: built-in translation
Here’s how it works: enable the tool in your blog’s settings. Then, when you activate the Community Translator, words in need of translation will be highlighted in green. You’ll be able to right-click on them, enter your new translation in the pop-up box that appears, and click “Submit”:
That’s it! Behind the scenes, we pass your translation on to GlotPress, where it goes through a standard process to be approved and then deployed to WordPress.com. In just a few days, you could see your contribution become the official translation.
You can enable the Community Translator right now in your settings page, as long as you’ve chosen a non-English language for your WordPress.com interface:
Then, activate and deactivate the translator by clicking on the floating Globe icon in the bottom right corner of the screen:
More detailed documentation is available on the support page.
We hope this new tool will make translating WordPress more rewarding and help improve the overall quality of translations. We’ll be continuing to work hard on making it easier for people to use WordPress in any language they’d like.
Happy blogging, in whatever language you speak!
- Language stats are surprisingly tricky. This “half” is based on wiki (55% English content in the top 10 million sites) and wiki traffic stats (47% English traffic across Wikipedia), along with approximations of Facebook’s traffic (52% English traffic based on ads data), and our own internal data (about 57% English traffic for most sites). For various reasons, all of these sources are likely to overestimate the use of English. ↩
- Internet World Stats estimates 28.6% of internet users use English as their primary language. ↩
- Ethnologue English and world stats at time of writing estimate 335,491,748 native English speakers out of the 7,106,865,254 world population, for about 4.7% ↩
- If your language isn’t not on the list, check out “Who decides which languages are available? I want my language added.” in the Translation FAQ for some links to get you started. ↩
- May 26, 2015
- Community, International, Language, Localization, New Features, Translation
WordPress.com News 
This is G r e a t! I’m very happy to be part of this worldwide community!!! Thank you developers! Ciao Mattia
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Why would I want to choose a non-English language for my WordPress.com interface?
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This tool is about translating WordPress.com into other languages, so by setting your interface to the language you’re translating into, you can see what it will look like to other people using that language.
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Reblogged this on blog.techwebguru.in and commented:
WoW!!
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There is no “Next step—> Translator” Button. Only the language “de- deutsch”.
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You’ll have to go to the user-settings page to activate it. Note that you can set the language of your blog separately – see https://wordpress.com/support/language-settings/
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That is my page “Next steps” http://www.mc-free.com/upload/extern/b42a63b04e4dea5eb87e7fbd6516b2be.png
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Try the Account Settings – Kontoeinstellungen. (Oops. I should have just put the link in my first reply 🙂 )
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Reblogged this on Jenia on WordPress.com and commented:
Translating WordPress.com directly from the interface? Yes, it’s possible! Kudos to the developers on Automattic’s Team Global for their work on this new feature.
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Absolutely delighted to hear this inclusive work being made available. Vive la difference and keep up the good work
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Reblogged this on Hew and commented:
We’ve just released our in-page translation tool at WordPress.com. Now you can translate almost any string you see right in the page with just a couple clicks!
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I think that this is a good addition and idea, but there are people who have their interface set to English for various reasons who also know other languages and excluding people whose interface is set to English is not a good idea in my opinion.
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It’s not our intention to exclude anyone, using the interface language just has a lot of benefits; You can choose the language you’re translating to, see and evaluate the current translations, and check that your new translation looks good in the page all at once. As an aside, you always get the English original when you right-click on a word, so it’s easier than you might think to use the interface in a language you’re not familiar with.
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How are those people excluded? It’s in English to begin with 😀
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Reblogged this on Nilzeitung.
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Great idea!! Thanks for thinking of us!!
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Reblogged this on LJH Business Support: A partnership that allows you to focus on growing your business!!!.
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Congratulations on this technical improvement to help include many who otherwise felt left out because of their language limitations when using WordPress. This certainly is good news!
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Thanks for the great innovation.
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Reblogged this on Naoko Takano and commented:
Translating WordPress.com just got easier, thanks to the developers of Team Global. With this new tool, you can translate strings on the spot whenever you find any untranslated text or wrong translations.
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Thank you Julian for all your help on WordPress.
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It’s really cool, at lease those who don’t understand English can be reached as well.
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Reblogged this on Common Sushi.
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As a certified translator who has over 10 years’ experience, I have never found an automated translator tool that works well and doesn’t distort sentences. These tools *usually* work well enough on a “word-to-word” basis. I will definitely test your tools and see what comes of it. Please be wary…
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Be aware that this is not automated translation. The Community Translator is a tool that enables people to enter translations at the place where they appear, instead of having to find the string they’d want to translate in another interface.
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I agree with Traduction G.E.M. !! Translating is a tricky affair that people who are not in the business greatly underestimate. Much more than a word by word dictionary is needed to render a text from one language to another. I also have not yet seen a machine translation that does not distort the text. But if the person translating a page KNOWS the target language very well such a tool for Word Press blogger can be useful.
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This is a great idea!
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This is great! ¡Que alegre!
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This is amazing! The word is shrinking indeed! And, soon the word “language barrier” will disappear from our dictionary!
The only bad thing is that it will discourage people from learning new languages! A sad thing for language lovers like me 🙂
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when are people going to be able to subscribe via mobile phone?? i have some people interested who do not have access to a computer or tablet
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Assuming you’re talking about the Community Translator, mobile support is something we’d love to do but it’s a much tougher problem that will take time to crack. (Otherwise, WP.com works well on mobile, and you should hit up support if you’re seeing issues).
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