WordPress Global Translation Day, which aims to increase awareness and participation in the effort to make WordPress available in as many languages as possible, will take place on the April 24th 2016.

WordPress is a truly global phenomenon. Tens of millions of people from all over the world rely on WordPress to communicate, to express themselves, and to run their business. In ten years, WordPress has grown from a niche blogging engine to a near-ubiquitous platform that gives a voice to anyone who wants to publish and maintain control of their content.

Because WordPress is an international phenomenon, it has to be translated into over a hundred languages. From Afrikaans to Yoruba via Breton, Cebuano, Dzongkha, Khmer, Mongolian, and around 140 other languages, dialects, and regional variations, hundreds of volunteers work to make WordPress useable by people in every country on Earth. As you can imagine, it’s a herculean effort — every new string added to the WordPress interface must be echoed in as many tongues as possible.

Managing the translation of WordPress is the job of Translate WordPress, who are organizing the WordPress Global Translation Day to attract the attention of potential contributors and to educate them about how WordPress translation works.

The goal of WordPress Global Translation Day is to increase the number of multilingual contributors, make headway on outstanding translations, and to add more translation editors to the project’s translation teams.

Over the course of 24 hours, WordPress Translate will live-stream video introductions that explain how volunteers can best contribute to WordPress’ translation efforts. They’ll also be organizing a number of local translation contributor days that interested people can attend, and remote translation days for those who can’t attend in person.

If you’re interested in contributing to WordPress Translation, head over to the project’s page, where you’ll see a list of languages. WordPress Translation is broken down by language and sub-projects, and it’s very easy to contribute if you have the language chops.

Don’t worry if you have no technical knowledge about how WordPress works, or if you aren’t a professional translator. The translation process uses the excellent GlotPress tool, which makes it easy to find strings that need translating and enter the language equivalents.

You can find everything you need to know about translating WordPress and using GlotPress in the Translator’s Handbook.