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Global WordPress Translation Day 2 – recap and results

Dear polyglots,

Global WordPress Translation Day 2, or how I’m hoping to start calling it from now on #WPTranslationDay 2 happened last weekend with 740  people all over the world joining and translating 60 000 stringsString A string is a translatable part of the software. A translation consists of a multitude of localized strings. in 133 languages. This is a somewhat long overview I wanted to post here for the people curious about what we did and how.

tldr: It was a great experience, led to amazing results and we’ll do it again, because it keeps increasing our contributor base.

What we did

 

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How we did it

  • We organised it publiclyin an open spreadsheet so everyone could join
  • We opened a call for speakers this time instead of selecting and inviting all speakers ourselves
  • We scheduled and prepared the live sessions to be streamed on Crowdcast with a session starting every hour
  • We used the WP community channels to reach out to WP organisers around the globe and invite them to join us
  • For some of the live session slots we streamed video from the first GWTD, we streamed my introduction to the team, John’s talk on i18nInternationalization Internationalization (sometimes shortened to I18N , meaning “I – eighteen letters -N”) is the process of planning and implementing products and services so that they can easily be adapted to specific local languages and cultures, a process called localization. This is the process of making software translatable. Information about Internationalization for developers can be found in the Developer’s handbooks. for WP developers and his talk on Character encoding from WCNL just because it was so awesome
  • We had a separate SlackSlack Slack is a Collaborative Group Chat Platform https://slack.com/. The WordPress community has its own Slack Channel at https://make.wordpress.org/chat/ team (WPTranslationDay.Slack.com) to communicate with local organisers and speakers during the day

Sessions

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Polyglots contributor training:

Development sessions

Community sessions

Gender neutral languages

Thanks to John Parkinson, we also have special community sessions recorded during the day that you can watch on WP.tv:

Stats

For a full overview of the WPTranslationDay 2 stats, please see this spreadsheet. Here are some highlights:

infographicstats

Local events

  • 67 local events for GWTD2 (39 for GWTD1)
  • 33 events in Europe
  • 2 events in Africa
  • 1 event in South America
  • 1 event in North America
  • 30 events in Asia (of which 14 in India and 7 in Japan)

Translated strings

  • 60426 for GWTD 2
  • 40350 for GWTD1

This number is important but it’s also important to note that 235 of the contributors during WP Translation Day were brand new which means that there might have been people who didn’t get to translate but only got training during the day, which is also important.

Number of people translating

  • 740 new people translated strings during the 24h of WP Translation Day 2
  • In comparison 448 took part in WP Translation Day 1

That is still only half of the people who signed up on wptranslationday.org, so I believe with a better email marketing approach we can reach even more people next time

Number of localesLocale Locale = language version, often a combination of a language code and a region code, for instance es_MX denotes Spanish as it’s used in Mexico. A list of all locales supported by WordPress in https://make.wordpress.org/polyglots/teams/ translated

  • 133 locales got new strings translated on November 12th
  • 70 of them got more than 10 strings translated
  • 30 of them got more than 500 strings translated
  • In comparison, WP Translation Day 1 saw activity for 54 locales so 133 is an impressive number
  • 31 of our current locales did not get any activity during the day – a note to do a better job reaching out to them

Most active locales

Ja (9716), es (6176), de formal and informal (5662), it (5270), tr (4362), ru (4308), sr (4257), bg (3181), mr (1287), sk (1220), lo (1178)

See the LocaleLocale Locale = language version, often a combination of a language code and a region code, for instance es_MX denotes Spanish as it’s used in Mexico. A list of all locales supported by WordPress in https://make.wordpress.org/polyglots/teams/ stats on the spreadsheet for a detailed report on each locale

Number of projects who got new strings translated: 590

Lessons learned:

General

What we did well:

  • The stats are amazing and there is growth in each aspect of the event – from number of local events to translated strings, to locales that got new translations and number of new translators
  • The live streaming gave us a chance to see each other and that made the feeling a great one overall
  • WordPress 4.7 got a huge boost thanks to the day – the focus on the project helped a lot of local events concentrate on a single thing to translate

What we can improve

  • The next WPTranslationDay needs an organising team from the start
  • Documentation for organisers could have been centralised and more neat
  • We should do a better job in reaching out to organisers and participants in the first two Translation Days
  • Connecting local events with the General Translation EditorsTranslation Editor Translation editors can approve translations for projects. The GTE (General Translation Editor) and LM (Locale Manager) roles can add new users with the “Project Translation Editor” role that can approve translations for specific projects. There are two different Translation Editor roles:
    General Translation Editor and Project Translation Editor     for the languages they’ll be translating in is important

Communication/marketing

What we did well:

  • We managed to reach out to many more organisers thanks to the active involvement of Naoko and Mayuko in Asia
  • We reached out to local organisers through the community team’s channels on time (Thank you, Josepha, for sending out that email)
  • We didn’t have to spend so much time on the website this time because we already had the base from the first event
  • We had a lot of the organisers posting on their RosettaRosetta The code name of the theme for the local WordPress sites (eg. bg.wordpress.org is a “Rosetta” site). All locale specific WordPress sites are referred to as “Rosetta sites.” The name was inspired from the ancient Rosetta Stone, which contained more or less the same text in three different languages. sites

What we can improve

  • We had too many different places we were sending people to:
    • Organisers to a spreadsheet, the website and the live streaming event
    • Attendees to both wptranslationday.org, the Polyglots blog (for potential organisers) and Crowdcast (also the Facebook event and the local Facebook events)
  • We need to find a way to help local organisers post on their Rosetta sites – perhaps a sample post can be automatically drafted in all Rosetta sites and we can ask editors to just post and translate
  • We can create a FB event earlier and figure out to feature all local events there so people actively using FB can find their event easier
  • We need a marketing team and a content plan
  • The live streaming can use better promotion on all channels – I managed to do some speaker cards on twitter but we can do that a lot earlier next time to gain more subscribers for the live streaming sessions
  • We have a huge base of people who signed up for the event which we couldn’t email because I couldn’t find a right way to do it:
    • We don’t have a centralised way to contact people
    • A mail chimp account needed a valid “from” email address and I didn’t feel it was right to put my own there as it would have seemed scummy
    • Mentioning all event organisers on the make/polyglots P2p2 “p2” is the name of the theme that blogs at make.wordpress.org use (and o2 is the accompanying plugin). When asked to post something “on the p2” by a member of the Polyglots team, that usually means you’re asked to post on the team blog https://make.wordpress.org/polyglots/. was a bit extreme but worked quite well for communication
    • We needed more people to help with the communication campaign – some sessions were not promoted well enough
    • We could have used some more training content “How to translate WordPress in…” not enough people did sessions during the day and some areas (languages) are still not covered

Live sessions

What we did well:

  • Panels and community sessions were a great idea and everyone enjoyed them
  • We had new people give sessions on interesting, important topics
  • The development sessions were great and generated a lot of interest

What we can improve

  • We couldn’t fill out all the speakers slots, some more attention there would help us cover important topics that we did not this time like:
    • Advanced tools for GTEs and PTEs
    • How to find translators and work with the polyglots community – a session for developers
  • We didn’t have enough time for each speaker to do a trial run with slides and some speakers had technical issues. With more people and a dedicated speakers team that can be avoided
  • The community sessions were a bit hectic and can use a bit more structure – trial runs with people wishing to jump on screen would also be good.

I’m really grateful that I have the opportunity to organise events like this for the Polyglots community.

The most important statistic is that Since GWTD 1 in April, the translation contributors have increased from 10000 to 17000. That means more people are translating than ever.

Thank you

I’d like to thank everyone who helped put the event together! To all local organisers and everyone who helped a new contributor find their way across our platform and start translating. A special thank you to all our speakers, to SiteGround, who hosted our site and to Human Made for covering the CrowdCast cost for the event.

And last but not least, thank you to all 700+ people who translated last Saturday.

Thank you. You are incredible 🌻

 

#events, #wptd, #wptd2