What We Did to Translate Our WordPress Plugin in over 50 Languages

Did you know that 56% of websites are in English? That’s a huge advantage if you are a native speaker; you have more than half of the web to enjoy at your finger tips. That said, only 27% of internet users actually speak English as their first language. There is something to be said about these statistics.

A study conducted in 2014 called “Can’t Read, Won’t Buy: How Translation Affect Global E-Commerce” by a market research firm Common Sense Advisory, released a report stating that 75% of people prefer to buy products in the native language and 55% of consumers will only purchase from website where information is provided in their own language. If you’re creating websites and products only in English, you could potentially be missing out on a lot of money.

In our experience, it’s hard to say exactly how many people from how many different countries have downloaded and are currently using SportsPress, as this information isn’t provided to us on the WordPress repo, but we have a pretty good idea that it’s widely used around the world. And how do we know this? Glad you asked, it’s all thanks to Transifex and our awesome translation team.

Transifex has been a great web-based tool to source translations for our plugin into many different languages. It’s free to host open-source projects and enables you to easily find translators or join other projects as a translator. In addition, Transifex provides a Python-based command line tool that makes it easy to manage and update entire project translations to sync with source code management systems like Git and SVN.

We can have a number of collaborators working together to translate one language, so if you’re interested in becoming a translator we’d be more than happy for you to contribute to this open-source project. Feel free to join our translation team or contact us for more information.

Yesterday, our developer Brian gave a presentation on theme and plugin localization at theMelbourne WordPress Developers Meetup at Inspire9. We hope that the attendees benefitted from learning about the importance of localization and some things to keep in mind when designing and developing themes and plugins. You can view or download the slides from the presentation here:

Sport is a universal language, played and loved by people in all corners of the world. It’s our mission to develop the best League Management plugin for WordPress users to build websites so they can get back to doing what they love most.

Thanks to our awesome translation team, SportsPress is currently the most active WordPress project on Transifex! To date, the plugin is being translated in over 50 languages by 39 translators and we’re continuing to work on expanding the plugin into more languages.

SportsPress also has a Pro version which includes premium features and functionality for serious teams, clubs, and athletes. If you’re a current SportsPress user, you can take full advantage of these features by upgrading to a Pro license.

Thanks again for all your feedback and support! We’re working hard to release new SportsPress features for you guys in the next couple of weeks. We’ll keep you posted.

All the best,
Ayla & Brian

Image: tokyo by Osamu Kaneko, CC BY 2.0

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