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WordPress.org

Welcome to the official blog of the translators team for the WordPress open source project.

This is where we discuss all things related to translating WordPress. Follow our progress for general updates, status reports, and debates.

We’d love for you to help out.

Translate WordPress

You can help translating WordPress to your language at any time. Just log in to the translation platform with your WordPress.org account, and suggest translations. If you want to help in managing and validating translations, please make sure to get in touch with the existing language team and follow the glossaries & style guides if the team has them.

Don’t see your language?

Request support for it by following this guide.

Weekly Meetings

We have meetings every week and at various hours every week. Check Slack in #polyglots (the schedule is on the sidebar of this page or the meeting schedule page). You are also welcome to ask questions on the same channel at any time!

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.

Home / Handbook / Translating WordPress / Requesting a New Locale

Requesting a New Locale

To translate WordPress in your language you will need to post a request in the Polyglots Blog that a new locale for it be added to translate.wordpress.org.

Before you do that, please read this page carefully, follow the steps, and gather the information needed.

Prerequisites Prerequisites

Check if the locale you are about to request isn’t already there Check if the locale you are about to request isn’t already there

The Projects by language page of Translate.WordPress.org lists all the locales that already exist and are ready for translations. If the language you’d like to translate for is there, great! You are ready to start translating after logging into your WordPress.org account.

If the language is there, but it looks like no one is working on it, check the Inactive translations page of the Handbook for instructions.

If the locale is not in that list, read on.

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Gather your team Gather your team

It is, of course, possible to translate and maintain a translation on your own, but at times it will be overwhelming. The WordPress project alone has more than 4000 strings. The first thing you should do is gather a team to work on your translation. Each member of your team will need a WordPress.org username. They don’t already have one, it’s easy to register for one here.

How big should your team be? How big should your team be?

We strongly recommend that you organize a team of at least two or three other people to help out. The good news is you can usually recruit this translation team from your existing WordPress community. If you don’t yet have a local WordPress community, this is a great time to form one. Your translation team will probably form the core of your future community. Many teams start with the mere objective of translating WordPress and evolve into a full-fledged community, organizing meetups and sometimes even WordCamps.

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Find your language code Find your language code

It’s now time to find a language code. Keep in mind that it is indeed a language code and not a country code. The first thing you should check is the list of locales that GlotPress supports. If your language code is there, that’s the one you should be using. If not, use Wikipedia or Ethnologue to find your language and the appropriate ISO 639-1, ISO 639-2 and ISO 639-3 codes. ISO 639-1 used to be used for the language subdomains, but for new locales we now use the ISO 639-3 code. In case you need more background, the Ethnologue website is a good resource.

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Choose a country code Choose a country code

This is only relevant if you’re planning to translate a language that varies from country to country, like French (which varies in Canada, Belgium, Switzerland, France, and many more). If such a variation exists, the country code will be appended to your subdomain, as in fr-ca for Canadian French or es-mx for Spanish as spoken in Mexico.

Screenshot 2015-05-02 10.05.11
Example: Spanish has a lot of location-specific locales.

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Plural forms Plural forms

After you research the language and country codes, you should find out how the plural forms of your language are defined. The following information is needed:

  • how many plural forms there are in your language (English, for example, has two, but Japanese only has one)
  • the rules for how plural forms are used

Here is a list of locales with their plural forms you can use for reference.

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Notes Notes

Once your request is fulfilled, you will then have at your disposal a Rosetta site, such as http://wayback.fauppsala.se:80/wayback/20200630225525/http://fr-ca.wordpress.org and support for translating all of Translate WordPress’ projects.

All of the above will be under the control of the WordPress.org user you have specified.

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Requesting the new locale Requesting the new locale

Have you looked through and completed all of the steps above? Excellent! Now it’s time to request your new locale.

Go to the polyglots blog and create a new post with the following information:

  • Locale: The ISO 639-3 locale code that is specific for your language
  • Country code: The specific code for your country (e.g. es for Spain or mx for Mexico)
  • Plural forms: The number of plural forms and the rules for those (e.g. nplurals=2, (n>1) for Artipan)
  • Language native name: The name of the language in the language (e.g. Български for Bulgarian)
  • Language English name: The name of the language in English (e.g. Bulgarian)
  • Sub-domain: The subdomain of your site will use the ISO 639-3 language code, so that’s what you will need to provide. Exceptions are locales for location-specific languages, where the subdomain uses the two-letter ISO 639-2 code followed by the country code (e.g. es_mx for Mexican Spanish)
  • Site Title: The title for your site should be the “Country or language name”
  • Site Description: The phrase “WordPress in xxx language” in your native language
  • Admin Username(s): The wordpress.org usernames of the admins for your site

As an example, here’s the form filled in for Spanish in Mexico:

  • Locale: es_MX
  • Country code: MX
  • Plural forms: nplurals=2; plural=(n != 1);
  • Language native name: Español de México
  • Sub-domain: es-mx.wordpress.org
  • Site Title: Español de México
  • Site Description: WordPress en español de México
  • Admin Username(s): xxx, xxx

Note: Your email address is not needed.

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Adding a new locale Adding a new locale

Please note it may take some time for one of polyglots team volunteers to be assigned for your request since there currently is a backlog. You can check the progress of all pending requests on this list.

The further process followed when adding a new locale is described under Adding a New Locale: Template.

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