A New Translation Platform
The full translation of WordPress.com is an ongoing process, of which you are a great part and whom we thank for the patience and assistance. Thanks to you, WordPress.com is now available in 60+ languages (and, yes, before you ask, esperanto, too). As you know, any text that shows up on your dashboard, widgets or (most) themes can be shown in one of the supported languages, by specifying a different language in the Language Settings of your blog’s dashboard.
Up to now the platform used for translation was simple and worked, but not only did it lack features that have been requested over time, but also made the approval and deploy process slow at times. Given the accelerated pace at which new features have been rolling out, we have been working on a new and improved translation platform that will make life easier for all involved.
Enter GlotPress, the new open source GPL project from Automattic, that is now the engine behind WordPress.com translations. Here are the most important changes:
- Filters for everything,
- Pagination! (no more filtering through thousands of strings),
- Faster, optimized process of string validation and deployment,
- Much easier to add new languages.
In the future we will bring in other cool stuff like keyboard shortcuts, more social functions (user profiles, comments, tags). We are pushing GlotPress live without them, because we were so impatient to deliver something better than the old system, that we focused on the most important features only.
Be sure to read the support pages on internationalization and on GlotPress, then dive into your language’s strings to make sure WordPress.com displays your language the way it should.
A few notes:
- Translations were generally approved by one of us at Automattic, but we can only validate so much as we don’t speak all the languages (we try, though!), so that we now support “validator” profiles on GlotPress, for those users who want to help out in semantic and consistency validation (and not just technical). If you feel this is something you might want to sink your teeth into, please drop us a line in the forums.
- Remember that for the 10 or so most spoken languages, we import those language communities’ translations directly, overwriting existing strings, at every new release. We strongly encourage you to get in touch with the .org translators for your particular idiom.
- If you are a programmer and wish to contribute to the GlotPress code self, there’s a Trac for the project, where you can browse the code and contribute with patches and additions.
The Image Widget, Plus News from Support
Last month, the Support team (also known as Happiness Engineers) got together to brainstorm new ways of providing you with the features and resources you need.
Out of that meetup came a number of improvements and features, like the RSS Links Widget, introduced earlier this month. Another is the Image Widget, launching today.
In the past, it was necessary to use HTML in a text widget to display images in your sidebar. Now all you have to do is plop a URL in the image widget. The rest is done for you. If you’d like to set a title, alternate text, and image size, it’ll do that, too.
And there’s more cool stuff coming your way:
We’ve made some improvements to the Support contact form, and a better search for Support is in the works. We’ve made some internal changes, too, that will help our growing team answer your questions even more efficiently.
There’s now a Hugs page to display some of the positive feedback we receive from those of you who write in to Support. It brightens our day to hear that we’ve helped out, so we’re sharing a bit of that love. 
Maybe most excitingly, we’re going to start providing Support in other languages — a much-requested feature. The first of these will be French, with several others to follow. We’ll post announcements here when each is launched.
