Event

Global WordPress Translation Day in Tokyo

September 30 was the third Global WordPress Translation Day (GWTD3).

Global WordPress Translation Day 3

649 translators for 60 different locales added 93,179 translations over the 24-hour period. 346 projects (core, meta, plugins, themes, and apps) got new language pack created as a result.

Meetups & Online Events in Japan

In Japan, there were four local meetups in Tokyo, Nagoya, Osaka, and Ogijima. We also had several online participants on WordSlack, the Slack instance for the Japanese WordPress community.

We held the Translation Day event in Tokyo at Gengo office for the second time following the last year. Active translation contributors Mayuko (Mayo) & Akira (atachibana) were there, and we had a nice mix of new and experienced polyglots.

“How to Make Strings Translator-Friendly” session

From 11 am, three of us did a live session on for the Crowdcast streaming.

The idea of the session came out from a question from WordCamp Tokyo Contributor Day participant. He asked how we should translate ALL CAPS, and some of us said: “we actually don’t have a good way to translate it in Japanese (because the Japanese language doesn’t make use of capitalization)”. Then, Mirucon said the best thing we can do is to try letting developers know not to use language-specific expressions such as this.

Mayuko, Akira, and I gathered some examples of strings that we can’t translate well and I categorized them into four types. I hope this is useful for anyone writing strings for WordPress, its themes & plugins, and any other products to be localized.

Making strings translator-friendly can not only help translators but improves the overall quality of the text for all users. Precise and unambiguous instructions and UI labels can be a great feature on its own.

It’s Fun to Work Together

I was only able to stay until 3 pm since I have kids waiting at home, but I’m glad I was able to join the offline event even for a short time. I enjoyed working side by side with other translators — it’s not something I experience much, as a member of a distributed company.

But working with a remote team was also a fun part of the event. It was great to see the GWTD3 organizing team put together the whole thing with strong teamwork (I’m listed as one of the team members but I had a minimum involvement due to my early maternity leave, the hard work was done by everyone else!).

Suggesting translation is one of the easiest ways to start contributing to the WordPress open source project for those who understand multiple languages.

You don’t have to wait until the next Translation Day to get started 😄

WPTD3-wapuu-512

WordFes Nagoya 2013 Photos and Reports

The fourth WordPress conference in Nagoya, WordFes 2013 took place in Trident Computer College on Saturday, August 31st.

The organizers, WordPress community in Nagoya, is a really powerful and creative team. For the past 2 years, they’ve successfully organized WordBeach Nagoya with a daytime conference and sleepover at an adjacent lodging facility. This year, they decided to go with a summer music festival theme; set up multiple “stages”, handed out wristband, and live streamed each session.

WordFes Nagoya wapuu stickers
WordFes Nagoya wristband
My session slide
WordFes Nagoya T-shirt (limited edition!)
WordFes Nagoya Fan
Hosting panel discussion
WordPress security session
WordPress logo & fauxgo at a sports bar
WordFes Nagoya after-show

I spoke about what the core team is planning for two upcoming WordPress versions (3.7 and 3.8). I translated the whole program to give you some more ideas of Japanese WordPress event:

  • Remote Office & Cloudsourcing (Michal Mikšík)
  • WordPress Use Case Show & Tell
  • No More Copy & Paste! PHP and WP_Query for Designers (Hidekazu Ishikawa)
  • Panel Discussion: Freelancing and Working for a Company (Yasuhiro Nozue, Hitoshi Omagari, Katz Ueno, Hiroko Matsushita & Kei Nomura)
  • Hands-on: Custom Post Types, Custom Field and Custom Taxonomy (Takashi Ono)
  • Hooks Can’t Be This Easy! (Takuro Hishikawa)
  • Creating a Custom Analytics Report in 45 minutes (Seiji Morino)
  • Hosting Service Panel Discussion Returns (Masaki Takeda/Windows Azure, Ken’ichi Nishimura/CPI, Masatoshi Yokota/Sakura Internet, Kumagami Takashi/Moderator)
  • Efficient Development with WordPress (Takashi Ishihara)
  • Blog Writing with Emotional Marketing (Kiyonori Ito)
  • WordPress Security for Non-Programmers (Takayuski Miyauchi)
  • Custom Posting System with Advanced Custom Field (Saori Yamada)

You can see that people are interested in various topics. Of course many of the sessions are on tips and tricks of WordPress customization, but WordPress users in Nagoya were also enthusiastic about sessions covering security, analytics, writing, hosting, and work style.

About 50 of us went to stay at the beachside Minamihama-sou like last year. It was nice to spend some extra hours together after an event, during which a lot of things are going on and it’s hard to sit down and talk with many people. We exchanged ideas about local meetups, played with Leap Motion WordPress Plugin, discussed recent WordPress related news, and just enjoyed each other’s company.

More Photos