If you’ve ever felt just a little, well, awkward with WordPress’s use of American (so-called) English – color, ‘uncategorized’ and so on – I’ve got frightfully good news for you.
A brief exchange of tweets this morning between myself, Dave Coveney and Automattic’s Peter Westwood led to the creation of a proper localisation project, to ‘translate’ WordPress into the Queen’s English.
Like nearly all WordPress translations, it’s being run through the online GlotPress application – which presents you with each phrase used in WordPress core, one by one, and invites you to translate it. In this case, of course, a lot of it won’t need translating: which means, as Peter so rightly points out, we’ll never hit the magic ‘100% translated’ mark.
Will this improve anyone’s experience of WordPress, on this side of the Atlantic? I doubt it. But it’s a bit of fun, and it might actually help with bug-hunting or UI refinement in GlotPress, or WordPress itself, to have two near-identical languages for easy comparison.
It also gives me (and you?) a chance to call myself a contributor to WordPress, not just a mere user. The GlotPress system is fairly intuitive; all you’ll need to get started is a wordpress.org forum account.
Of course, this United Kingdom has numerous languages with official recognition (of some kind), not just English: Welsh, Gaelic (both Scottish and Irish), Scots and indeed Ulster-Scots. Putting my government hat back on, I’d love to see a situation where the relevant language promotion bodies organised, funded, or even just contributed to translation efforts on WordPress, or other online technologies of similarly wide take-up.
3 thoughts on “WordPress in proper English”
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Could chip in a few quid for a ‘civil service’ version… replace ‘next’ with ‘going forward’ and ‘submit’ with ‘leverage’, that sort of thing…
There’s also the question of whether you want a “translation” or just a text conversion – for example, should it be “email” or “e-mail” (note that the existing en-us mixes it between different messages); should it be “Super-Admin” or leave as “Super Admin”; should commands have “please” added to them?
I’m sure the Ulster Scots Agency would sponsor you for a translation. Although I notice that their website is only available in proper English.