Request support for it by following this guide. We’ll have you up and running in no time.
Weekly Meetings
We have two weekly meetings on Slack in #polyglots, on Wednesday 06:00 UTC and Wednesday 11:00 UTC. If you have any questions, bring them to the weekly chats!
Posting here
In order to post to this site, you will need to log in with your wordpress.org account. Your first post may take a while to show up, as it is moderated. Please follow our tag policy when posting.
To contribute translations using translate.wordpress.org, simply log in (or register an account) to your WordPress.org account. This automatically gives you the necessary permissions to contribute to any translation projects.
Once logged in, you’ll see a list of locales. We’ll use Peruvian Spanish as an example on this page.
translate.wordpress.org organizes translations in projects and sub-projects so that you could have, for example, the “WordPress” project and a sub-project for every version, as seen in the example below.
If this is your first time translating for the WordPress project, we recommend you start by translating the WordPress project by clicking the “WordPress” tab in the darker gray navigation bar.
Click the “Translate Project” button in the “Development” box. You’ll see a list of components (“translation sets”).
Pick a translation set you’d like to translate. In the screenshots below, we’ll use the “Development” set.
Now that you’ve selected the locale that you’ll be translating, you’ll see a list of strings to translate. High priority and untranslated strings will be shown at the top.
Across the top of that list, you will see links to the filtering and sorting functions which will help you narrow down the strings you want to work on (Translation Editors will see additional options.)
Each string has a “status”, indicated by the background color of the row.
Statuses can be untranslated, suggested, approved (or current) and fuzzy. Any string starting with a red bar indicates that there are validation warnings. Triggers for warnings can be mismatched HTML tags or too much of a difference between the length of the original and the translation.
Current: A green background (◼︎) indicates an approved string, which will be in a future (or current) version of WordPress. These are the only strings that will be deployed.
Waiting: A yellow background (◼︎) indicates a string that was suggested, but not yet approved by a Translation Editor.
Fuzzy: An orange background (◼︎) indicates a “fuzzy” string. It could be a translation suggested based on a similar string or Google Translate suggestion. Those translations need to be reviewed for accuracy and edited or approved.
Old: A purple background (◼︎) indicates a string that was obsoleted by a newer, approved translation.
Warning: A red bar to the left of a string, indicates validation warnings, such as mismatched HTML tags or a large difference in length between the original string and its translation. These translations either need to be corrected or their warnings explicitly discarded by a Translation Editor.
To start translating a string, double-click on the one you want to translate (or click on “Details” in the right column).
As seen above, the string’s line will expand and you’ll be presented with a text box where your translation can be written. In the example above you’ll replace the line that says “[Enter your translation here.]” with your translation. Additional information in this box includes the string’s context (e.g. what source code file its located in), its status (based on the color key above), and its priority for translation.
Type your suggestion for the translation and click the “Suggest new translation” button.
A “Copy from original” link will do just that – copy the English string to the text box. In some cases and languages, it’s easier to translate from the original string. In both cases, don’t forget to click the “Suggest new translation” button.
Once your suggestion is sent, a box will open for the next string.
Suggest as many or as few strings as you want. Be aware that the same string can have any number of different suggestions, from different users. It will be up to the Translation Editors to decide which one fits best.
There are three user roles in translate.wordpress.org: Guest, Contributor, and Translation Editor.
Guest
Guests are all users who don’t have or are not logged into WordPress.org accounts. Guests can see the projects and their translations but can’t suggest translations or add them to the already translated set of strings.
Contributor
Contributors can suggest translations and see other translations of the same strings, suggested by other users. To become a contributor, you need to register or log in to your WordPress.org account.
Translation Editor
Translation Editors can add translations, manage suggestions, and approve or reject suggested translations. If you’d like to become a Translation Editor for a current localization, you’ll need to contact the current General Translation Editors requesting access. If you’d like to become the General Translation Editor of a new localization of WordPress, review the “Requesting a New Locale” page.
After a contributor suggests a string, the string gets a status of “suggested”. In order to transform them into “approved” strings (which are the only ones that are deployed), a Translation Editor needs to accept (or reject) those suggestions. Translation Editors will see a “Bulk” link on the top left-hand corner of the screen which will allow them to select several strings at once and approve them, reject them or even bulk query Google Translate for suggestions. Strings suggested by Google Translate will have a status of “fuzzy”, meaning that they’ll need to be explicitly corrected (if needed) and approved, before they are marked “approved”.
In addition to these permissions, a Translation Editor can also:
filter “waiting” suggestions (suggested but not approved)
filter translations that have generated warnings
filter “fuzzy” translations (i.e. generated in bulk by Google Translate)
upload external files (e.g. if a translation was made outside of translate.wordpress.org initially)
discard warnings
A string translated by a Translation Editor is automatically approved (but will still generate all applicable warnings).
If your language is listed in translate.wordpress.org, chances are there is a team localizing WordPress into your language. Visit the list of current localization teams to find your local Translation Editor (click the “Team” link).
If your language is listed, contact your Translation Editor. If you are unable to do it, it’s possible that your translation team is currently inactive. In that case, follow the process for inactive translations.
There may be the case where a Translation Editor needs to import translations from an external file, mostly when the team chooses to use other tools (.po, .android and .rrc are currently supported formats). When the file is imported, untranslated strings and strings which are different from existing strings will be written. Also, if the imported file contains original strings not present in the string list of translate.wordpress.org, those strings will be ignored.
GlotPress is the open-source engine that powers translate.wordpress.org – the translation platform of WordPress and related projects.
GlotPress is an open source project, just like WordPress. If you’d like to help improve GlotPress please visit the GlotPress blog or the GlotPress Trac. Contributions GlotPress will be used by hundreds of people who translate WordPress for millions of people around the world.
