Amharic is one of the official languages of Ethiopia, used by 21 million native speakers in the country. WordPress Amharic Locale (#am) was added to the WordPress project in 2014 and recently celebrated its first release of WordPress coreCore Core is the set of software required to run WordPress. The Core Development Team builds WordPress. with version 5.9.

Amharic LocaleLocale Locale = language version, often a combination of a language code and a region code, for instance es_MX denotes Spanish as it’s used in Mexico. A list of all locales supported by WordPress in https://make.wordpress.org/polyglots/teams/ Manager/GTEGeneral Translation Editor 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. Yohannes (@jowi2020) became a GTE of Amharic locale in October 2020. For WordPress 5.9, he contributed translations of 8,808 strings.

Tor-Bjorn (@tobifjellner) asked Yohannes some questions to learn more about the milestone.

Conversation with Yohannes

When did you decide to contribute translations?

When I see any Amharic or Tigrinya website powered by WordPress, it is usually half English and half translated. It is not intuitive; the reason is that they don’t have the latest WordPress release in any of those languages, so I decided why not contribute.

How much time did you spend?

 2-3  hr/week or more. I couldn’t come up with all hours I spent on it.

Did you celebrate in any way when you reached 100%?

I was happy when you shared WordPress Amharic became downloadable on wordpress.orgWordPress.org The community site where WordPress code is created and shared by the users. This is where you can download the source code for WordPress core, plugins and themes as well as the central location for community conversations and organization. https://wordpress.org/.

What’s your next goal?

My next step is to contribute to the Tigrinya language, for the same reason I started translating in Amharic.

Congratulations, and good luck with the Tigrinya translation! If you are interested in joining Yohannes, comment on this post or the Make WordPress #polyglots channel.

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