Aarón García Redondo

Hello! My name is Aarón García Redondo and this is my final report of the WPCredits course. This report contains a summary of my contributions to the Polyglots team, along with the challenges I faced and the skills I learned. I trust that this will inspire other people to contribute to other open-source projects.

Teams and Projects I Contributed To

During the course, I contributed to the WordPress Polyglots Project, specifically, on the translation of plugins to Spanish (Spain), making it more accessible to those who don’t speak English.

Learning Resources

Firstly, I learned how the Polyglots project works by reading through the Polyglots handbook, the Spanish (Spain) glossary, and the Spanish (Spain) style guide; and watching many different videos from WordPress TV, such as Polyglots: WordPress Translation Onboarding, Introduction to WordPress Polyglots Team – cohort 1 and Polyglots onboarding – cohort 2. My mentor, Paula Carmona, has helped me through the process of setting up my own website, and cleared any doubts I had with some parts of the course.

Challenges and Solutions

While translating, one of the issues I came across was the fact that some strings contained placeholders, like «%s». At first, I didn’t know what they were, so I decided to watch through Polyglots: WordPress Translation Onboarding once again, and then I recalled that it was simply a placeholder, and that it shouldn’t be translated.

Another problem I ran into was the fact that sometimes, we wouldn’t get the context that the string appears in, which can make translation very difficult. Fortunately, I was able to fix the problem thanks to a specific tool named «Translate Live», which sets up a WordPress playground that has the plugin installed, allowing you to see the context the string appears in.

My contributions

Here are my contributions:

• Shield: Blocks Bots, Protects Users, and Prevents Security Breaches: a total of 7 translations, all of which were accepted.
• Ultimate Addons for Elementor: a total of 149 translations, all of which were accepted.
• WPCode – Insert Headers and Footers + Custom Code Snippets – WordPress Code Manager: a total of 384 translations, all of which were accepted.

The total amount of translations suggested is 540, all of which were accepted.

Key Learnings from the WP Credits Course

The WP Credits taught me about the importance of open-source projects and how they work, and it also taught me how to write concise translations that are easy to understand for everyone.

The WordPress community was also very helpful, supporting everyone during meetings.

New Skills Gained

Some of the technical skills I gained are: basic understanding of PHP databases, how to use the WordPress block editor, and technical vocabulary related to websites.
Regarding soft skills, I learned asynchronous communication, time management, and improved my understanding of the English language.

Personal Reflections and Next Steps

Contributing to WordPress has been very easy to get into, thanks to the welcoming community and the helpful lessons on the WP Credits course. The thing that I liked the most is that I could contribute to the Polyglots project, as I’ve always considered translation to be a very interesting field. In the future, I’d like to continue contributing translations, since, as I’ve already explained, I really enjoy translating.