November came and gone and unfortunately I did not get around reading a book this month. But, the last couple of weeks I have not been too lost for words either…
I think it was about 2 years ago or so, I attended my first WordPress Contributors day. At first everyone, including me, would think, ‘How can I possibly make any contribution?’. There are however many different ways for anyone to get involved with WordPress. The WordPress core software is open source and built by hundreds of community volunteers.
These volunteers work in different groups, divided into following:
- Core
- Design
- Mobile
- Accessibility
- Polyglots
- Support
- Themes
- Documentation
- Community
- Plugins
- Training
- Meta
- TV
- Flow
If you are bilingual, that makes it very easy to find at least one thing to start helping out with… Translating! Over the last few years I found myself doing a bit of translating WordPress from English to Afrikaans, my first language. Initially it has been a slow process. Attending contributors days (usually coincides with a WordCamp) definitely helped. The first Global WordPress Translation Day was 24 April 2016. This was a good day to set out doing a bunch of translating.
After WordCamp Cape Town, 8 & 9 September 2016, I noticed more interest from other people towards translating the project. When the second Global WordPress Translation Day took place on 12 November 2016, it was really exciting seeing even more people showing interest in translating WordPress to Afrikaans. Especially this day, was a huge success for translating WordPress by people from all over the world.
With that said though, there was still a bit to go to get to 100% of at least the WordPress Development project. This is necessary to create the initial language pack. Whilst being relatively close too, it felt right to get it all done for the next major release, WordPress 4.7. I also felt strong that at least another big project in WordPress should be done for this release. The last month I re-allocated all my reading free time to help translating the WordPress Development and WordPress 4.6.x project. Today, only a few more days to go before the release of WordPress 4.7, these two projects are at 100%! Finishing WordPress 4.6.x, was a good way for me to see how an existing language pack in Afrikaans work. To add to the good news, the Rosetta (for af.wordpress.org) and Browse Happy projects are too!
At the time of writing, the stats for Afrikaans are the following:
Besides these, volunteers are also translating plugins and themes.
If you would like to download WordPress in Afrikaans or find out more how to help with translating WordPress to Afrikaans, make sure to visit af.wordpress.org.
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