Artbees Hosted Istanbul Meetup on WordPress Translation Day 4

24 hours, 81 local events, 612 volunteers and contributors. Yes, this is the power of WordPress! On Translation Day 4 on May 11, the WordPress family came together in 35 countries around the world to celebrate the MakeWordPress polyglots team. Hundreds of volunteers dedicated their time and skills to translate all things WordPress and to make this online platform available to more people around the globe.

We at Artbees wanted to be part of this amazing polyglot crowd and event, so we decided to hold a meetup in Istanbul. It was the best chance for us to both meet with fellow WordPress lovers in Istanbul and to contribute what we could to help WordPress grow into as many languages as possible.

It took us such as long time to recover from all the excitement of Translation Day 4 in that we’re finally getting around to publishing this post! Everything went as planned, and on a cloudy Saturday morning, Niloufar and Maziar gathered at a cozy diner in Istanbul to help make the event a success.

After setting up the equipment, preparing snacks and welcoming two other attendees, we lined up to join the live session with Afsana Multani, WordPress enthusiast, speaker and contributor, and to speak with the WordPress community as first-time polyglots contributors.

Other activities as part of WordPress Translation Day 4 included live online training, localization and internalization sessions as well as local and remote events. During the course of the day, polyglot contributors collaborated on a number of common goals such as increasing the number of PTEs and mentors, translating the 200 most popular themes and plugins and improving Rosetta’s Translate page.

We hit the ground running, and our local Istanbul meetup contributed translations to WordPress.org and WordPress Rosetta projects! Being among avid participants from 35 countries with the common goal of making WordPress more accessible in different languages felt beyond amazing!

What is WordPress Translation Day

WordPress Translation Day – which takes place every year – is a 24-hour worldwide marathon that is committed to translating everything in the WordPress sphere, including core, themes, plugins, documentation and marketing assets into as many different languages as possible.

The day is entirely driven by contributors, who volunteer their competence, time, labor, and equipment to translate WordPress into their languages. Everyone from WordPress professionals to inexperienced users is invited to join in the event.

Previous WordPress Translation days had over 700 people globally participate both online and in person in local meetups to translate WordPress – but the event has grown in size throughout the years. Translation Day 4 had more local meet-ups than previous translation days with contributors working around the clock in Africa, Asia, Europe, North America, South America, and Oceania.

Why We Should Contribute to WordPress

The main aim of WordPress Translation Day is to help make WordPress understandable to as many people as possible around the world. This aligns with the WordPress culture of giving back to the community.

On a regular basis, contributors with varying levels of experience from developers to marketers, designers and translators lend their expertise and knowledge to the WordPress open source project, which in turn helps millions of people throughout the world to build websites and provide digital services.

Anyone who knows about any aspect of WordPress can contribute to creating, maintaining and growing the platform. Contributors are part of the larger global WordPress community and ultimately aim to enhance the platform and connect with other WordPress enthusiasts.

Why WordPress Needs to be Translated

The reach of WordPress is far and wide: it powers more than one-third of all websites – meaning that there’s a need to translate a massive amount of content into several different languages.

The number of languages that WordPress has been translated into has grown since the first Translation Day was held. In 2017, WordPress was translated into 178 languages. That number has now surpassed the 200th mark.

Presently, WordPress is accessible in 201 locales with 3,086 PTEs, 614 GTEs, and 32,585 contributors.

The more that WordPress is translated, the more that users throughout the world are empowered. Thanks to the hard work and commitment of the global polyglot community, more and more people are able to access the most popular WordPress plugins and themes that have been translated into their language.