I picked Polyglots, and specifically the Spanish (Costa Rica) locale, es_CR.
Before deciding I looked seriously at Core. Contributing code to WordPress
through Trac is the option that lines up most closely with my degree, and it was
the one I wanted at first. What made me change my mind was the review cycle.
Core patches go through a long approval process, and there is no guarantee that
a patch submitted at the start of a term is resolved by the end of it. I am
taking four courses this term, so I needed a project where the amount of work I
put in translates into visible progress on a predictable schedule.
I also considered Support. Answering twenty forum threads is real contribution
work, but the pace depends on what problems users happen to post and whether
they come back to confirm a solution. That is outside my control.
Polyglots solved both problems. The work is measurable, since a string is either
suggested or it is not, and the queue is always full. When I checked the
WooCommerce project for es_CR there were over seven thousand untranslated
strings, so finding work is not the bottleneck.
There is a second reason that matters more to me than the logistics. Costa Rica
has its own locale in the WordPress translation system, and it is far from
complete. Most Spanish speaking users here end up reading an interface localized
for another country. Working on es_CR means the strings I approve are the ones
people in my own country will read.
The technical side of the work is what I did not anticipate liking. Translating
strings like “Enables including ETag and Cache-Control headers” forces me to
understand the feature before I can name it in Spanish. It is closer to reading
documentation than to translating prose.
My goal for the program is one hundred strings contributed to es_CR.
Leave a Reply