Gabrielsalazardotblog WPCredits

When I started the WP Credits program I had used WordPress for coursework but had never contributed anything back to it. This report is the summary of what changed over the program and what I am taking with me.

What I contributed

I joined the Polyglots team and worked on the Spanish (Costa Rica) locale, es_CR. By the end of the program I had 149 strings translated and approved in the locale, most of them in the WooCommerce project. All of my contribution time went to a single team, which let me get past the surface of the work and actually understand how translation on WordPress functions.

What I learned

The technical side surprised me the most. I expected translation to be a language exercise, but a lot of it is closer to reading documentation. Strings like “Enables including ETag and Cache-Control headers” cannot be translated well unless you understand the feature first. Placeholders such as %1$s and inline HTML have to survive intact and still make sense in Spanish word order. The locale glossary matters more than personal phrasing, because consistency with previous translators is what makes a locale usable.

I also learned how the project governs itself. Suggestions sit in a Waiting state until a General Translation Editor reviews them, and nothing counts as a contribution until it is approved. Early on this confused me, since my first suggestions did not appear anywhere in my profile. Working through that taught me more about how the project is structured than any of the onboarding reading did.

Beyond the mechanics, the thing that stuck with me is that es_CR is a real, incomplete locale that people in my country actually use. The strings I approved are the ones Costa Rican users read in their own interface. That made the work feel less like an assignment and more like something with a small but real audience.

What comes next

I plan to keep contributing to es_CR after the program ends. The queue is effectively unlimited, the workflow is now familiar, and I would like to move toward reviewing as well as translating once I have enough of a track record. I also want to stay active in the community channels rather than treating the program as the finish line.

Closing

WP Credits took me from someone who consumed WordPress to someone who has left a permanent, verifiable mark on it. The number I care about is not the string count, it is that the Costa Rican locale is a little more complete than it was when I started.