Tgi che sa rumantsch sa dapli — if you know Romansh, you know more
Switzerland has four official languages: German, Italian, French, and Romansh. Growing up in the canton of Grisons, I got in touch with the latter early on. Unfortunately, it is a dying language. To do something against this, I decided to translate WordPress into Romansh. And I don’t even speak the language!
But WordPress would be the ideal platform for a Romansh translation. The world’s most popular content management system (CMS) has a market share of 35% and is also very common in Switzerland. That means many people are interacting with it on a daily basis.
It all began with a simple idea a couple of years ago, I think it was around WordCamp Europe 2015. After talking about this with some people, many showed interest and also thought it would be a cool idea. However, nothing concrete happened yet.
The First Steps
In order to move things forward, I got in touch with the WordPress Polyglots team to properly set up Rumantsch on the translation management platform. I figured that this was the biggest hurdle to overcome. Once the translation platform was ready, interested people could just start translating and actually make this happen. I was able to do some basic translations myself thanks to an online dictionary. However, for the more complex strings I needed help from people who actually speak the language.
Besides talking to friends and acquaintances who speak Romansh, I also got to know Gion-Andri Cantieni and his initiative Software rumantscha. I was pretty impressed when I learned that they have been successfully translating Firefox, Microsoft Office, and even the Contao CMS to Romansh for quite some time. This was even in the news, which showed me that it’s not a crazy idea at all to try to translate WordPress.
Now that we were a group of people, we were quickly able to translate about a third of WordPress to Rumantsch. At WordCamp Europe 2017, I shared the story about how we got there with the global WordPress community:
Getting Involved
Efforts stagnated a bit after that, but now I want to take another attempt at translating WordPress into the Romansh language. It’s quite fitting that this year marks the 100-year anniversary of Lia Rumantscha, the local institution that promotes the Romansh language and culture.
As of today, the Rumantsch translation of WordPress is around 35% complete. This is what it looks like in the WordPress admin:
To get it to 100%, I need your help!
First of all, if you’re interested in using WordPress in Rumantsch or want to support the translation efforts in any form, please let me know!
If you want to jump right into the action and start translating WordPress, all you need is a WordPress.org user account. Once signed up you can head to translate.wordpress.org right away to find all the projects that can be translated.
This includes WordPress core, but also the WordPress.org websites and even the WordPress mobile apps. The most important project to translate is certainly WordPress 5.0, the current WordPress release.
We’ve collected some helpful resources for translators at roh.wordpress.org/translatar. Yes, that’s right — WordPress en Rumantsch has its own website! In addition to that page, the Polyglots handbook has some very useful information as well.
Also make sure to join the WordPress Switzerland Slack workspace at wpch.slack.com using your WordPress.org email address (<username>@chat.wordpress.org). There we have a dedicated #polyglots channel for this purpose.
Have you got any questions so far? Please leave a comment, send an e-mail, or ping me on Twitter.