Publishing tools for everyone

Roughly half of the content and traffic on the internet is in English1, yet English is the mother tongue of only about a quarter of internet users2, and less than 5% of the world's population.3 We believe that WordPress.com should be for everyone, not just English speakers -- it's why we already serve WordPress in 131 languages -- but we want to make it even more accessible.4

To keep so many languages up to date we need to make it radically easier for non-English speaking communities to help with translation. We're proud to announce our latest step in that direction: the Community Translator.

Introducing: built-in translation

Here's how it works: enable the tool in your blog's settings. Then, when you activate the Community Translator, words in need of translation will be highlighted in green. You'll be able to right-click on them, enter your new translation in the pop-up box that appears, and click "Submit":Right-click on a word

That's it! Behind the scenes, we pass your translation on to GlotPress, where it goes through a standard process to be approved and then deployed to WordPress.com. In just a few days, you could see your contribution become the official translation.

You can enable the Community Translator right now in your settings page, as long as you've chosen a non-English language for your WordPress.com interface:

Then, activate and deactivate the translator by clicking on the floating Globe icon in the bottom right corner of the screen:in-page-translator-globe

More detailed documentation is available on the support page.

We hope this new tool will make translating WordPress more rewarding and help improve the overall quality of translations. We'll be continuing to work hard on making it easier for people to use WordPress in any language they'd like.

Happy blogging, in whatever language you speak!

  1. Language stats are surprisingly tricky. This "half" is based on wiki (55% English content in the top 10 million sites) and wiki traffic stats (47% English traffic across Wikipedia), along with approximations of Facebook's traffic (52% English traffic based on ads data), and our own internal data (about 57% English traffic for most sites). For various reasons, all of these sources are likely to overestimate the use of English. ↩
  2. Internet World Stats estimates 28.6% of internet users use English as their primary language. ↩
  3. Ethnologue English and world stats at time of writing estimate 335,491,748 native English speakers out of  the 7,106,865,254 world population, for about 4.7% ↩
  4. If your language isn't not on the list, check out "Who decides which languages are available? I want my language added." in the Translation FAQ for some links to get you started. ↩