Wrap Up

Hello and welcome to the final report for my WPCredits course. My name is Alejandro Muñoz Vindas, and in this report I aim to summarize my contributions to Polyglots—specifically Polyglots(es_CR)—the challenges I faced along the way, and the skills I acquired. I hope my experience will serve to motivate new students to contribute to the WordPress open-source project.

As I mentioned in the previous paragraph, I contributed to the Polyglots(es_CR) team, which is responsible for translating the WordPress ecosystem into the regional Spanish of Costa Rica. My contribution involved translating the “Twenty Twenty-Five” theme—one of the most popular themes for creating blogs on WordPress—to help more people in Costa Rica use it.

Since I had no prior experience working on open-source projects, the documentation and videos from the WordPress course were my main sources of knowledge and guidance. They helped me figure out which group to join, how to find the Costa Rican translation team, and how the WordPress translation system worked. Once I had done that and was ready to start translating the glossary for the Costa Rican region, it was extremely helpful to know how I should translate certain words.

The main challenge I faced during this process was finding Costa Rica’s communication channel, because I needed to report on my contributions so they could be approved. This was a problem for me since several countries had a Slack channel for their Polyglots team, but that wasn’t the case for Costa Rica, and the Polyglots website had a page with all the links to the Slack channels by country. When I saw that there was no link for Costa Rica, I thought there would be no way for me to contact the Costa Rican editors to have my translations approved. To solve this, I started searching the WordPress Costa Rica site for a link to a communication channel. Luckily, I found it—the Slack group was called general-es-cr (https://wordpress.slack.com/archives/C0B8BUH6QPK) and there I was able to contact the Polyglots team in Costa Rica to have my contributions approved. Another challenge I faced was that, once I started translating, there were certain words and phrases I wasn’t quite sure how to translate. To solve this, I referred to translations that had been done in other regions, such as Argentina, Mexico, and Colombia.

Below is the link so you can view my contributions:

Translation contribution to the “Twenty Twenty-Five” theme: https://translate.wordpress.org/locale/es-cr/default/wp-themes/twentytwentyfive/

Among the key lessons I’ve learned during this project are:

• How to Contribute to an Open-Source Project
• How to Use the Slack Communication Channel
• How to Communicate Assertively with Different Teams
• How to Translate Lines of Text

Thanks to this project, I learned technical skills such as translating text and using WordPress’s translation tools and ecosystems. I also developed soft skills such as the ability to communicate with large teams, patience, and empathy.

Finally, what surprised me most about this process was how easy it is to contribute. At first, I thought it would be more tedious and complicated, but I truly had a very positive experience—both with the team and with the translation tools. I would definitely like to continue contributing to the WordPress ecosystem by helping to translate themes, plugins, and the WordPress core.