Improving ClassicPress translation systems and coverage will be a major initiative for 2020, and this thread is a call for volunteers including but not necessarily limited to the following related tasks:
Count me and my translation/localization skills in…
And me, with my Queen’s English skills…
Me, too.
I’ll try and allocate time for 2020 to do a Swahili translation for CP plus themes and plugins that might need it 
I’ll continue helping where I can.
Hi,
I would be pleased to do English (Canadian) if asked…
Cheers
Avrom
I volunteered on Slack for UK English, happy to jump in whenever needed.
And my wife could probably do Tagalog and Cebuano!
I don’t know if you need EN(AU). We speak perfect Queen’s English here so may not be necessary. But if you do, let me know.
Thanks to all for volunteering. I know we have been through parts of this before, but I wanted to have a single place to see who is interested, which will make it easier to get in touch when this gets back up and running again…
I do think we should keep only one variant of each language for now. Doesn’t make much sense to me to have multiple variants of English, but not have other major languages covered.
Could there be a way to load translations from WP, as a starting point?
Yes, this is what we did for the languages that we already support, around one year ago.
For any new languages we’ll need to figure this out again as I don’t think Daniele documented what he did.
I agree entirely that the main aim has to be to get CP translated into all the major languages but I can’t really see any harm in people offering their services to translate CP into their native language, whether it’s a variant of English or whatever.
I speak British English and I’d really like to be able to use CP in British English. As it’s the only language I speak (other than gibberish), I can’t help with any other languages.
My tuppence worth.
I think, the main thing here is to raise the server environment (e.g. GlotPress in a subdomain).
Exporting/importing WP language packs seems to be rather easy since there are endpoints for everything. E.g.: //translate.wordpress.org/projects/wp/4.9.x/ru/default/export-translations/?format=po, where ru is a language code and po is a file format (can be json and other). There are also links for network, admin and other parts. So, we can get all strings in any suitable format and treat them as we want.
The number of supported languages doesn’t really matter, I think. It’s just a number of language packs. When we’ll have a proper environment for 10 languages, this means that we can actually manage 100 or 1000. The most popular will be just translated faster and have a better coverage due to a larger number of contributors and editors. But the others would be still available for contributors.
The harm is that we end up with too many language variants, some of which become unmaintained and then they sort of lose their usefulness. I also think we’re not really ready to handle propagating new strings and new translations throughout multiple variants yet.
We see this with pt_PT (Portuguese - Portugal) and pt_BR (Portuguese - Brazil) right now. I think we’ll probably need to reconcile these - for example look at the differences (there probably aren’t any?) and maybe only keep one of them.
If we have enough people who want an en_GB translation in order for us to be able to maintain it well, then that probably makes sense. However I don’t think we should add en_CA and en_AU into that mix until we’re more sure of what we’re doing and we have more of a feel for how many differences there should actually be. (I’d expect almost no differences between en_US and en_CA for example.)
@james differences do exist, but it’s better to have major global languages in first and use them to test the environment, then add the others basing on the real statistic need (for this we need to have a way to see how many users to expect for a language pack, if there’s a way to understand that).
Also adding all languages now is the way to overwhelm and overkill.
Instead I can suggest something VERY SIMPLE.
Can we just have a poll appearing in every CP dashboard?
I can see your point James from a practical perspective. I don’t know what range of nationalities we have in the CP community. Is that a stat that’s available to us? Could we reach out to specific people in the community as opposed to asking for volunteers?
I was just looking at https://translate.wordpress.org/ to try to get some idea of WP translations. There are, if I counted correctly (very quickly) 192 languages, of which I estimated around 25% are complete.
Could we use the number of contributors to each WP language as a guide for CP? Or is it just a case of who is available to help?
Incidentally, I know someone who may be able to help translating to Swedish (and Kurdish).
Agree with all of the above…
Not simple!!! Coding the poll correctly, doing a release, aggregating results, making sure people don’t vote more than once… A forum poll would be much better, but we have a few things to do before we are really ready to add new languages yet.
Such as this, as a first step. Expect more here in early January.
I can help with both Dutch and Formal Dutch if the second one is ever added.
Hi there! I know this has long been asked, but in case you are looking for someone who speaks German as their mother tongue, I am available. I notice that there are quite a lot of missing translations for German when it comes to CP specific text, so I am hoping to be able to provide German translations for these. Where do I start?