Simon Dickson has been blogging about online government, politics and WordPress since 2005. Some important people read it.

 
 
Monday 22 August 2011

WordPress in proper English

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.

Comments ( 3 )

  1. Simon says:

    Could chip in a few quid for a 'civil service' version… replace 'next' with 'going forward' and 'submit' with 'leverage', that sort of thing…

  2. James Forrester says:

    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?

  3. John Adams says:

    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.