For many of us, we’ve always known WordPress as a global, multi-lingual, and multi-cultural endeavor. As of today (August 2020), we have over 200 locales into which WordPress is translated. Each locale is a representation of the community behind it – for every language, there is a community of WordPress enthusiasts.
But this wasn’t always the case! The Polyglots team, as it is now known, all began with this short, but meaningful post. Internationalization was first added in version 1.2 via the gettext() method, which we still use today. The first internationalized versions of WordPress we saw are tied back to the Hindi, French, Japanese, and Norwegian communities.
At the time, the translation process was much more manual and coordinated primarily via the wp-polyglots listserv. Translators would manually translate .po files (usually in a text editor or a desktop software like Poedit) and then generate the necessary .mo files using a script, and prepare an internationalized package by placing them on subversion. In late 2009, GlotPress was announced as the new tool for WordPress.com translation. Then in early 2010, WordPress.org locale teams started using translate.wordpress.org for core translation of WordPress 3.0.
Following the 2012 Community Summit, even more focus was placed on developing a global Polyglots community, around which many Polyglots-related efforts centered on the further integration of GlotPress and global coordination. During the same Community Summit, team representatives were developed to help with coordinating across WordPress teams and projects, which later paved the way for the Polyglots Global Mentors that we have today.
In 2015, the online translation mechanism of translate.wordpress.org became available for all plugins and themes in the WordPress.org directory, lowering the technical barrier for translation contributors.
In 2016, the first ever WordPress Translation Day was organized. The 24-hour event drew in nearly 500 people and was another step in the global organization and community building of the Polyglots team. There have been four additional Translation Days organized since, and we’ve even seen individual teams host their own translation days, including the French and Italian communities.