 Hello, everyone So let's talk about languages a few people know that Switzerland has four official languages German, Italian, French and Romance and unfortunately the latter is a dying language and to do something against it I decided to translate WordPress into Romance and I don't even speak the language and That's what I'm going to talk about today First of all, I want to give you some background about the language. So, you know, like What it's it what it is about So as the name implies Romance is a Romance language Such that shares similarities like French Italian Spanish and so on Or as one guy said it on YouTube Romance sounds like a German had a one-eyed stand with vulgar Latin and this was the result with a population of around eight and a half million people an Estimated 50,000 to 100,000 people in Switzerland speak Romance and it's even classified as a endangered language by UNICEF as It's mostly spoken in a few parts of Switzerland. You don't hear it every day yet many official government documents and websites are written in Romance because it's mandatory and And because it's an official language, there's even a radio and TV station and the daily newspaper even There's also a Romance hip-hop group called Lyricas and Alice and You could loosely translate this to like explicit lyrics and even though they're speaking and singing and rapping in Romance people like they like their music and it's really It's not like excluded so now you know a bit more about Romance and But how did I end up translating it? So about two years ago, I started to wonder what it would be like if web press was available in Romance. I think it was around Global translation day or like work in Europe even and I wondered if I could help preserve the language By translating wordpress into Romance So given that many government websites need to be available in Romance I figured having the most popular CMS out there being available in that language would help it however It's not an easy task. So Basically every region where Romance is spoken they have their own idiom like their own dialect of the language There's there's no like one Romance But 20 or 30 years ago People tried to to solve this and they created something called Romance Christian, which is like one unified language And it's an attempt for a unified written language actually, so it's it's not spoken But it should help preserve the language Because you don't have anything that's split into multiple idioms Which only a few thousand people speak and people could just learn Romance Christian in school and however, it's still a bit controversial among people and Because it's only a written language even native speakers They have to use a dictionary to write proper Romance Georgian And it's a dictionary that it allowed me to translate wordpress into Romance Last year. I finally decided to like let's do it. Let's create a Romance translation for wordpress So after doing some research and reading through the polyglot's handbook I eventually got access to a brand new local site for Romance It was a really cool moment and an important milestone for the project because now we had one page We could share all the information about wordpress in Romance and how to translate it and It got me really excited to continue with that and The problem is I just needed someone to do to do the actual translation So first I reached out to a fellow student of mine Who speaks Romance? He quickly showed interest, but he was really busy at the time and couldn't really help with that But his father was recently retired and was in need of a new hobby Luckily the wordpress translation platform Allowed me to export a list of all the strings in wordpress together with the German translations And this enabled my friend's dad to write that Romance translations whenever he felt like it And we would just like important you translations on translate.wordpress.org and We got some progress Even better was the moment when I found out I'm not the only one interested in translating software into Romance In fact a group of young people have been maintaining the Romance translation of Mozilla Firefox for about 10 years now And the main reason is it's because it's open source and They also maintain language packs for Thunderbird and even Microsoft Office, which I think is pretty impressive and Guess what their website runs on? It's wordpress so of course when I reached out to them they were immediately interested in the idea of translating wordpress into Romance and They were all years and like on board immediately and before I even introduced them the Translation platform and the local site the one guy already created an account on wordpress.org and translated hundreds of strings in one day Yeah, I was definitely impressed by that So today the Romance translation is already at about 40% complete and We managed to do this in only a few months time and I'm confident that we can get this to 100% soon So how does the future of the Romance translation look like? Obviously we want to keep momentum and to complete the Romance translation of wordpress as soon as possible and When I chat with the others we decided on some sorts of strategy for that so first of all we thought about like Doing some kind of hackathon over a weekend like lock ourselves in and just do some translation Maybe I can even like learn to speak the language And another part is reaching out to to government agencies and local foundations which try to preserve the language and to see how we can benefit from each other because it's really difficult When you need to like when you try to translate wordpress into Romance with all the like the technical terms You have to invent new words and in a dying language Yeah, I think I'm Can definitely manage to to get this done soon and absolutely achieve something great in the end. I Hope you like this short introduction to Romance and how wordpress can help preserve the language. Thank you very much