Every September 30th, International Translation Day celebrates the importance and impact of translators. For several years, many locales and the global Polyglots team have organized events on or around this date to celebrate those who make WordPress available in multiple languages: Polyglots contributors!
Last year, the Polyglots team and Marketing team worked closely together to organize virtual events around Translation Day. We saw community members organize more than twenty mini-translation events to encourage new translators, celebrate accomplishments, and connect with other Polyglots.
While September may seem far away, I’d like to share a proposal so we can start planning early for Translation Day 2021. Starting now will help all the teams involved promote events, plan for resources, and support even more locales to take part.
Translation Day 2021
Though we planned to celebrate Translation Week in 2020, some locale teams continued the celebration for weeks by hosting regular Zoom meetings to hang out and translate together. (I’m looking at you, @nilovelez!) It was really moving to see the excitement and to have so many opportunities to connect during a year when we weren’t able to celebrate together in person.
For Translation Day 2021, I’d like to suggest that we host events throughout the entire month of September. In other words, let’s do a translation month! I know, a month sounds like a long time. However, the goal is to create more flexibility for locale teams to host an event at a time that works best for their local community at some point in September.
On a global level, the Polyglots and Marketing teams can work together to organize a weekly event each Thursday throughout the month. Ideally, these events would alternate by timezone, just like the Polyglots weekly meetings. That might look like:
- Thurs, Sept. 2: Start the month-long celebration with a resource document that includes guides on how to start contributing. @nao also suggested hosting sessions for the Polyglots Training course at this time, too.
- Thurs, Sept. 9: Panel
- Thurs, Sept. 16: Panel
- Thurs, Sept. 23: Panel
- Thurs, Sept. 30: Close with a live stream event and recap post.
We could use these globally organized events to host panels or interviews to talk with contributors from multiple locales. We can even invite contributors from other open source translation projects to share their experiences as well.
What do you think?
Translation Day is an excellent opportunity for Polyglots contributors to reflect on what we’ve accomplished throughout the year and celebrate making WordPress accessible in other languages. With all of that in mind, it would be helpful to know:
- What do you think of the idea of a month-long celebration?
- Does this help you with planning a local Translation Day event?
- For the globally organized events, would you be interested in hearing about any specific topics?
- If you don’t like the idea of hosting events throughout the month, do you prefer a week-long celebration? A single day?
Any feedback or thoughts you have are welcome!
If you would like some inspiration or haven’t participated in a Translation Day before, check out last year’s events. You can also find a whole playlist of all the streaming events organized last year.
A big thanks to @webcommsat, @tobifjellner, and @nao for helping to write, review, and share feedback on this proposal.
#translation-day
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Thanks for putting together the post, @evarlese!
I think a month-long format will work well for the team, it gives a lot of flexibility and time for locale teams to organize their event that fits them the most.
Really looking forward to organizing the event again this year and seeing everyone’s creative ideas for getting translators excited and motivated.
I think a month is pretty long. Specially while now everybody is busy recovering from covid businesswise.
As for global events, I think a discussion or planning for translations would be welcome. E.g. how are we going to improve quality, amount of work, using automated translation, using predifined libraries for standard translations, expected translation work.
Thank you, Peter!
For the discussion, it sounds like having an open, informal chat to share ideas and best practices on some of those topics may be helpful. Maybe something like a GTE roundtable?
@evarlese, thanks for starting the conversation.
I think a month-long ‘Translation Events’ is an excellent idea, that gives a lot of freedom to the local communities and individual contributors to choose the time of their own convenience.
A suggestion for the globally organized events: Some discussion about creating glossaries/lexicons for the locales will be helpful for many Indian language translation efforts.
In India, we hosted Zoom meetings a couple of times to come together and translate. Five or six different locales were translated in those meetings, some translated strings got approved as well.
We would love to be part of this month-long Translation effort. Let’s do this together.
Thank you so much, Yogesh! This is really helpful, and it sounds like having some more flexibility with timing might work well for some communities.
I also think having a discussion or roundtable on glossary best practices is a great idea to include. Moving forward, I’d like to include these discussion ideas in another post to see if anyone would be interested in helping organize – so this is great 😀
Another idea to add to the list of potential topics: a roundtable discussion or informal chat about the challenges of local community organizing in 2020/2021, what’s worked, and what’s been really hard.
I do agree that the month-long format will bring flexibility for each local team to schedule the event. Besides, it would also increase the participation number as contributors can join at their pace without interrupting their constant schedule like work/study-related kind of stuff.
Adding, the month-long format surely will help organizers manage the event easier as the sessions are days separated.
Thanks for the feedback, @psmits1567 @kharisblank @yoga1103!
A post to follow-up this discussion is published here:
http://wayback.fauppsala.se:80/wayback/20210714144751/https://make.wordpress.org/polyglots/2021/07/13/wordpress-translation-day-2021-planning-call-for-organizers/