Theme Translations and Language Packs are Coming to WordPress.org

WordPress.org will soon support translations and language packs for themes hosted in the official directory. In Matt Mullenweg’s Q&A at WordCamp Europe 2015, he emphasized the importance of having better language support for themes and plugins and identified this as a high priority for continued improvements to WordPress.org.

Today the WordPress meta team announced that theme translations will soon be available on WordPress.org at translate.wordpress.org. Within the next few days or weeks, all active themes (those updated within the last two years) will have their strings imported.

“This will involve importing ~1500 themes, which, combined, have about 315,000 total strings,” Sam Sidler said in the announcement. “After duplicates, the number drops to only 80,000 unique strings.”

The most exciting change is that themes hosted on WordPress.org will soon be able to take advantage of language packs. Theme authors will have the option to remove translations from their zip file in favor of allowing WordPress.org to deliver the language packs, resulting in smaller download sizes.

“Eventually, we also plan to give priority to localized themes in localized directories; e.g., someone searching the Romanian theme directory will see Romanian themes prioritized over English-only themes,” Sidler said.

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