Olá!
My name is Wiliam and I am a GTE A General Translation Editor (often referred to as GTE) is a person, who has global access to validate strings on all projects for a specific locale. volunteer for the Brazilian Team.
An interesting case related to translations happened recently that I wanted to share with you so we can think about it.
Someone mentioned me in this WooCommerce support post and I went to check to see what was. In short, an update to WooCommerce included a plural version for the string A string is a translatable part of the software. A translation consists of a multitude of localized strings. “address” and, consequently, as the string was not yet translated, the button disappeared from the front-end. The problem was reported on Github by other users in other languages.
WooCommerce is a very popular plugin A plugin is a piece of software containing a group of functions that can be added to a WordPress website. They can extend functionality or add new features to your WordPress websites. WordPress plugins are written in the PHP programming language and integrate seamlessly with WordPress. These can be free in the WordPress.org Plugin Directory https://wordpress.org/plugins/ or can be cost-based plugin from a third-party and it is very sensitive, as ecommerce is a source of revenue for a company. So a bug like this is also sensitive. To make matters worse, the plugin has thousands of strings A string is a translatable part of the software. A translation consists of a multitude of localized strings. and is constantly updated. I’ve already lost count of how many hours I spent to get to 100% and a single update takes us back to 60% complete.
But I don’t want to get into the merits of the problem itself here, what I was thinking about was the communication challenge in relation to WooCommerce translation (and that applies to any other WordPress project).
I looked into it and noticed that in the case of this bug reported on Github GitHub is a website that offers online implementation of git repositories that can easily be shared, copied and modified by other developers. Public repositories are free to host, private repositories require a paid subscription. GitHub introduced the concept of the ‘pull request’ where code changes done in branches by contributors can be reviewed and discussed before being merged be the repository owner. https://github.com/ many users were implementing snippets as a temporary fix. The work of adding another snippet to the site (and the impact of this on maintenance), for me, is the same or worse than officially translating the plugin. But the thing is, they don’t know how to do it. Other people were using Loco to locally translate the file on their own website. This is also absurd, since the translation on translate.wordpress.org The platform for contributing to the translation of WordPress core, themes and plugins. works the same, but reaches everyone.
I didn’t notice anyone in the discussion pointing out an official translation path or guiding users on how the translation works.
I believe that a user without this knowledge might even discover translate.wordpress.org and suggest translations (WooCommerce already had all the suggestions pending), but it lacks the information that the user needs to give a helping hand for the translations to be reviewed. Or maybe even he could be a PTE A Project Translation Editor (often referred to as PTE) is a person, who has access to validate strings on a specific project (for example BuddyPress, WooCommerce or Twenty Fourteen) for one specific locale. A project translation editor can approve strings that are added by translation contributors. Per project translation, editors are appointed by a general translation editor after a request by the project author or by the contributors themselves. himself.
Is this not a usability problem with translate.wordpress.org?
Some questions I ask myself:
- Shouldn’t there be some way to notify PTEs of that project that there are new strings awaiting approval? Perhaps in a consolidated weekly email report?
- Shouldn’t the translate.wordpress.org page itself have some additional warnings and information?
- Wouldn’t it be interesting to automatically invite the user to be a PTE when they contribute X number of suggestions? In that case he could receive clear instructions on what to do, right?
- Within the WordPress core Core is the set of software required to run WordPress. The Core Development Team builds WordPress. dashboard, wouldn’t it be interesting to have a CTA to help translate? How about a link in the footer when the user is in the settings of a plugin with incomplete translation?
I believe that improvements in this regard could help to correct problems such as the address in WooCommerce more quickly and, as a bonus, could bring in new volunteers for the translation process.
