sergiocamachor

My first contribution to WordPress was submitting translation suggestions for the Astra theme in Spanish (Costa Rica). The first entries taught me that the visible sentence is only part of the task: a contributor must understand where the string appears, protect technical tokens, and write for the target locale instead of translating mechanically.

How I worked

I started with clear user-interface strings and checked the context shown by translate.wordpress.org before suggesting each translation. I preserved placeholders such as numbered variables and format specifiers, kept HTML elements unchanged, and skipped sources that were ambiguous, malformed, or consisted only of technical markers. This reduced the risk of submitting text that looked plausible but could break the interface.

The first quality lesson

Consistency became more important as the set grew. Spanish varies by region, and a translation that sounds natural in one locale may not follow the conventions of another. I used the Spanish (Costa Rica) glossary and revised earlier suggestions to maintain formal “usted” language, sentence-case capitalization, high quotation marks, and neutral terminology. I also exported my complete contribution set so I could audit it as a group instead of trusting isolated entries.

Result and evidence

The contribution grew to 150 suggestions. My personal waiting filter shows exactly 150 entries, and Astra’s es_CR project changed from 1,930 to 1,780 untranslated strings while the global waiting count increased from 39 to 189. I then submitted a Polyglots Editor Request for community review.

Reflection

The first contribution made WordPress feel less like a finished product and more like a community-maintained system. The work is public, reviewable, and useful, but it also carries responsibility: suggestions should be clear enough that volunteer editors can evaluate them efficiently.