Ahmad Awais

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WordPress in Urdu — History in the Making!

Ahmad AwaisAhmad Awais
wp_100_urdu_translation

TL;DR We did it! WordPress 4.7 will be the first WordPress version with 100% Urdu translation! Thanks to 110 translators. #WPTranslationday.

Urdu is my mother tongue and the national/official language in PK. I always wanted to help make WordPress more accessible by translating it in Urdu. So, I decided to take the initiative to bring WordPress in Urdu by finding, helping and teaching more than 60 translators.

What Am I Trying To Pull Off?#

I am trying to help the local community realize just how powerful the WordPress software is. It helps me put food on the table; I get to join an incredible family of friendly developers — throughout the world — in the form of our WordPress Community. And heck, as a Full Stack Web Developer, I make excellent web products like themes, plugins and in the near future, a WP based SaaS App.

Next Ten Years With WordPress!#

So, to help with the WordPress adoption in my country, I have set different goals. In the next ten years, I want WordPress to have the maximum adoption in Pakistan — as compared to other CMS’s. While this is a stretch goal, I believe I can do it.

I have started teaching young software engineers especially those in their freshman or sophomore years at the universities and colleges — who I believe will be the next generation of software developers that will make or break as I like to call it — the next WordPress.

Helping However I Can!#

To help spread the word, I have started teaching small groups of software developers about how to participate in the open source community by making FOSS (Free and Open Source Software).

Instead of coding boot camps, one can learn a lot more by actually contributing to an open source software like WP and by interacting with other developers worldwide.

Earlier this year, I taught about 15 contributors about how to help others with their WP problems by contributing their time and participating in the Global WordPress Contribution Day.

Right after that, Petya Raykovska from Bulgaria arranged WP Global translation day but being more involved with code side of things as a core contributor; I didn’t participate — only to later regret that. Though, when she arranged another WP Global Translation Day 2 I knew I had to do something.

How Did It All Get Started?#

I knew my skill set as a translator was as bad as it could be. But I thought — this shouldn’t stop me from teaching people and helping them get ahead? That’s exactly what I did. As a dev, I know how WP translation works, basics of L10n and I18n was something that I could teach people, add to it, the ease of translating WordPress via Translate blog I figured, we might just end up translating WP in Urdu. I had arranged a friendly helping with the help of

That’s it. Long story short, Petya helped me in getting things ready, and a bunch of us participated in the Global WordPress Translation Day 2. I had arranged a small meetup in Lahore with the help of Ashar Irfan, Hassan Raza, and a few others, but most of us were online in WP-Pakistan.Slack.com (join us) team, where inside the #translators channel people started to translate WP in Urdu.

100% WordPress Translation in Urdu#

In about a week, many folks like Saqib Ameen, Hassan Raza, Bilal Khan and everyone mentioned below (now part of the WP Urdu translation team) did their level best to contribute. All I did was to teach people what is what and how is how! They took it from there and now we have an active team contributing on a daily basis.

? We have finally translated WordPress dev/trunk in Urdu. IMHO this is the first 100% WordPress to Urdu translation. Which essentially means that next major release of WordPress i.e. 4.7 in December will have a 100% Urdu translated variant.

⚡️ This is HUGE!

Now, WordPress can be used for Govt. sites where a11y is a requirement at least for both Eng/Urdu languages. There are more than 3,000 Urdu Bloggers and a community of 1 Million active Urdu writers in Pakistan.

I’d like to thank every single contributor on the team for helping me in making this dream of mine a reality.

WordPress Urdu Translation Team

Contributors’ Remarks!#

“I think this translation initiative will provide motivation to other contributors for the future translation of WordPress in the Urdu language. We have made it to 100% Urdu translation for the first time in the history of WordPress through this initiative. I hope more and more Pakistani WordPressers contribute to keeping the translation of the future version of WordPress to 100% in the future.”

— Ashar Irfan

” یہ ورڈپریس کو اردوانے کی ایک بہترین کوشش ہے اور اردو کی ترویج کے لیئے ایسی کوششیں جاری رہنی چاہیئے اور ہمیں اردو ترجمے کے ماہرین سے بھی رہنمائی لینی چاہیئے اس کوشش میں۔ چاہے وہ رہنمائی مفت دستیاب ہو یا کچھ معاوضے کے عوض۔”

— Hassan Latif

“بہت اچھا لگا کہ سب نے مل کر ایک ایسے کام میں حصہ لیا جس سے آنے والے وقت میں بہت فوائد حاصل ہوں گے. ورڈپریس اردو ترجمہ میں تمام حصہ لینے والے دوست مبارک کے مستحق ہیں. “

— Muhammad Bilal Khan

“I think what we did here was an incredible effort, right for the webmasters of Pakistan, removing the language barrier, making it understandable for more and more people here & hence promoting our national language. I see it as a good cause that’s why I volunteered to be a part of it. “

— Muhammad Tehseen

“While no one had taken an initiative to do this in the past, a group of highly motivated fellows finally helped include Urdu to the WordPress language options. I feel proud to be a part of the amazing team that made it possible, and now you can add Urdu as your language in your WordPress Dashboard! “

— Mustaasam Saleem

“It was an honor to be a part of the amazing team who made this possible. I had contributed for the first time, and believe me, the feeling of contributing selflessly to an open source community is invaluable. I think everyone should join the cause and this amazing WordPress community.”

— Saqib Ameen

“Translating WordPress in our language was a pleasant experience. Thanks to Ahmad Awais for inviting me on Global translation day. I think it was an excellent opportunity to give back to the community. I congratulate everyone involved for this amazing achievement.”

— Hassan Raza
UPDATE: We just added our third edit after Saqib and Bilal! It’s M. Farhan Danish — who is also an Urdu translator at Twitter, WhatsApp, Skype, etc. FTW! He went ahead and created the first Urdu Glossary for WordPress.

P.S. I was half asleep while writing this post — traveling! Bear with me for the typos, and other mistakes.

P.P.S. If you’d like to interact with me at the Facebook post, here it is!

Founder & CEO at Langbase.com · Ex VP DevRel Rapid · Google Developers Advisory Board (gDAB) founding member. 🧑‍💻 AI/ML/DevTools Angel InvestorAI/ML Advisory Board member San Francisco, DevNetwork

🎩 Award-winning Open Source Engineer & Dev Advocate 🦊 Google Developers Expert Web DevRel 🚀 NASA Mars Ingenuity Helicopter mission code contributor 🏆 8th GitHub Stars Award recipient with 3x GitHub Stars Award (Listed as GitHub's #1 JavaScript trending developer).

🌳 Node.js foundation Community Committee Outreach Lead, Member Linux Foundation, OpenAPI Business Governing Board, and DigitalOcean Navigator. 📟 Teaching thousands of developers Node.js CLI Automation (100 videos · 22 Projects) & VSCode.pro course. Over 142 Million views, 22 yrs Blogging, 56K developers learning, 200+ FOSS.

✌️ Author of various open-source dev-tools and software libraries utilized by millions of developers worldwide WordPress Core Developer 📣 TEDx Speaker with 100+ international talks.

As quoted by: Satya Nadella · CEO of Microsoft — Awais is an awesome example for developers.
🙌 Leading developers and publishing technical content for over a decade 💜 Loves his wife (Maedah) ❯ Read more about Ahmad Awais.

👋… Awais is mostly active on Twitter @MrAhmadAwais

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Comments 4
  • Riyaz
    Posted on

    Riyaz Riyaz

    Reply Author

    Assalamalaikum Brother,

    Jazakallah khair for this innovative development in WordPress. It will definitely help the Urdu users around the world. May Allah bless you.


    • Ahmad Awais
      Posted on

      Ahmad Awais Ahmad Awais

      Reply Author

      That’s very kind of you to say! ?


  • Nomair
    Posted on

    Nomair Nomair

    Reply Author

    Salaams. I have a English WP site, how do I make it UR and allow users to switch based on their preferences?

    Please help.

    Thanks