 Hello everyone. I'm Ben. I'm from Automatic and I'm a full-time contributor to WordPress. I am also the training team team rep for 2023 but today I'd like to talk to you as someone who is passionate about helping people learn. I'm passionate about helping people learn about WordPress and I'm passionate about helping people learn about WordPress in their own language. So looks can be deceiving but English is not my first language. Japanese is actually my first language. I was born in Australia but my family moved to Japan when I was two years old and all my education was done in Japanese. My friends are Japanese. My wife is Japanese. Life outside of WordPress is Japanese for me. And so as somebody who speaks multiple English and Japanese, I see a difference in the world about how information is accessible or not accessible to different languages. There are a lot of resources on the internet for people who speak English but I want to see the same information presented to people who even don't speak English. And so today I'd like to share with you how you can contribute to the localization of content on the Learn WordPress website. So Learn WordPress. How many people have accessed this website in the past? Learn.wordpress.org. All right. If you haven't accessed it, please get your phone out and type it into your browser and open it in a tab so you can look at it after the session is over. I want you to focus on the presentation for the moment but do open it in your browser so you can take a look later. Learn WordPress. This is the official education website for the WordPress project and the goal is to become the definitive educational website for all users of WordPress. So we want people who use WordPress, like Build site, come to this website. We also want people who develop WordPress to be able to come to this website and find the information they're looking for. We want designers and extenders to use Learn WordPress as their go-to resource and then we also want contributors, community members to be able to use this website as their resource also. So yeah, if you haven't seen this website before, do check it out. The Learn WordPress website, we have new content produced every week. We have some content pretty much every day that comes out here and so somebody has to make that content, make sure it's updated and keep the learning WordPress website just current and fresh and new for people who visit. And that is the training team's responsibility. So the WordPress training team looks after the WordPress Learn website, the actual website itself, but also the content we produce there. So the training team has actually been making educational content since 2013. So we're coming up to 10 years this year. WordPress is 20 years old, so half of that, the training team has been active. But the Learn WordPress website itself, we've been stewarding this site since 2020. So three years now, the Learn WordPress website has been going. On the website, we have four types of content. We have online workshops, we have video tutorials, we have text-based lesson plans, and we have online courses. So let me introduce each of these to you. Online workshops, these are live interactive sessions often hosted on Zoom and other video conferencing tools. To be honest, this is my most favorite type of content on the Learn WordPress website. You get to meet WordPress users from all over the world, interact with them live, get their questions, help them learn new things about WordPress. So I really like these. Online workshops, the topics vary. So we have content for beginners to WordPress, like how to make your WordPress account, how to log into WPA admin, what the block editor is. We also have content for developers, so how to make a block theme, how to use the REST API. We have presentations, but we also have live demos of people actually coding, and you can ask the developer questions while they're making plugins and themes. We also have just general discussions about how the internet works, like what is a domain? And what is SEO? How can you improve your SEO? And finally, we also do online workshops about the WordPress community. So what meet-ups are, what different events are, what the different teams are, and how you can get involved. So in English, pretty much every single day, there is something going on at Learn where you can be part of and learn about WordPress. The second type of content are video tutorials. So these are roughly five-minute videos about single topics. So if you want to just learn a specific feature about WordPress or just get information about one specific point, then these videos are really good. We've started to localize some of these videos as well. So you'll see in the screenshots here, we have a Japanese tutorial video. We also have a Portuguese tutorial video. So we've started to see some of these get localized. Lesson plans. So lesson plans are text-based plans for teachers of WordPress. So online workshops and tutorials are for learners of WordPress who want to learn, but these lesson plans are for the teachers. So we often hear meet-up organizers say they're enthusiastic about meet-ups. They want to organize an event, but they don't know what to talk about or what, like, what discussions to have. And so these lesson plans give meet-up organizers 30 to 60 minutes worth of content they can take to their meet-up and deliver. So they have screenshots, they have learning objectives, they have assessment exercises that everybody can do on their own computers. Basically, it's a meet-up packaged on a single page for you. So we have these lesson plans as well. And because these are text-based, we're seeing an increase in people translating these lesson plans into different languages. And the fourth type are courses. So as the name suggests, these are online courses you can take. We have about 20 courses at the moment, and unfortunately none in languages other than English. Every single course at the moment is in English. So you have to be able to speak English to take these. Again, the course topics vary between basic WordPress usage, development, blockchain development, how to get involved with the community, etc. So these are the four types of content on Learn WordPress. When you look at the statistics, 83% of people on the world do not speak English. 83% don't speak a single word of English. So everybody here would fall in the 17% over this side of the graph. We all speak at least a little bit of English. But in reality, most of the world doesn't. But when you look at the Loan website, only 11% of our content is in languages other than English. And when you think about the hundreds of languages there are, we only have about a dozen languages represented on the Loan website. And most of those languages only have one or two pieces of content. So there is a huge gap here between the need in the world and what Learn is actually producing right now. When you break it down, online workshops about 19% in January were in languages other than English. So we've been doing Japanese workshops since August last year. From autumn last year we did a couple of Greek online workshops. And this year we've seen some Bangalore workshops happening as well. So we have Japanese, Greek, and Bangalore. Combined in January, these were about 20%, 19% of online workshops hosted. Tutorial videos. We have over 130 videos on Learn at the moment. Out of those, 15 have been translated. So good job. But we can do better. We can definitely do better. Lesson plans. We have over 100 lesson plans. And out of those, 15% have been translated. Well, 15% are in languages other than English. So we want to still translate all these lesson plans. And courses is still 0%. So there's a huge potential here for people to localize content. So now that you know about Learn and what Learn is about, how can you contribute to the localization? Now when you talk about localization, I think everybody first thinks of translators. So we need translators. And that is very true. But what I want to share with you today is there are more ways than just translating to localize content. Translators is one important role, but that's not the only role. To summarize, well, I'm about to share in the next few slides. This URL says it all. So look at this URL. It's make.wordpress.org slash training slash handbook slash getting started. The training team launched a brand new onboarding program this month. So last year, we noticed people would come to training. They were enthusiastic. They had excitement. They wanted to get involved. But we didn't have a really good onboarding system for them to understand how they can contribute to learn. And so for the last few months, we've had a project going with different volunteers creating a new onboarding program. It starts from the same URL, but depending on your interest, it branches off into different parts. So if you're interested in translating, we have an onboarding path for translators. But if you're interested in the other areas of content localization, this same onboarding URL will take you there. So look at this URL later as well. If you're interested in localization, this will give you all the details for that. So that's my presentation session. So if you want to walk out, take this URL, and that's it. But let me give you a bit more details. So this is the general flow of how content is translated. So first of all, you choose a piece of content, generally English. And then you translate the content. And then you review the translation. So we generally have content reviewed by two or three people before it becomes published on Learn. So we have a review step. And then finally, it's published. If you're making new content, there's an extra step at the beginning, which we call topic vetting. So at the moment, the training team has over 100 topics of content we want to create, 100 topics that different users have suggested to us they want content for. And so these topics go through a vetting process to identify the priority. So depending on what WordPress development is going on at the moment, depending on the needs of the users, there is a vetting process so we can prioritize different topic and then people can build out those content. So if you're making new content, there's a topic vetting, then you create the content. And then there's a content review step. And then finally, that content is published. So that's an overview here. And what I want to point out is there are different roles involved in this process. So I have a couple of colored bubbles here. These are the different roles that are involved in this content creation process. So on the far left there, we have content translators. And this is probably what first comes to people's minds when you think about localization. But then in the center here, we also have content creators. We have translation reviewers. At the top right, we have subject matter experts who vet the content topics. And we also have editors. So what I want you to pick up here is that there are different roles that work together in order to localize content. In the training team, we pull it out as a model like this. So on the far left, you have content creators. These are the people who actually write the lesson plans or record the tutorial videos or build out the courses. We also then have content translators. So these are the people who look at the English content and translate that into their different languages. We have subject matter experts. So these subject matter experts are the experts of different topics. So you have a subject matter expert about WordPress development or plugin development. And then you have a different subject matter expert about WordPress SEO. And then you have a subject matter expert about content writing. And the reason why we have subject matter experts is so that content creators don't have to be the experts. Content creators work with subject matter experts to build out the content. So you can be someone who is passionate about video recording or passionate about building online courses. You don't have to be an expert because there is a subject matter expert there who will work alongside you and provide you with the information to build the content from. So we have content creators, content translators, subject matter experts. We have editors. The editor's primary job is to review content before it is published. But editors also look at content that has been published to see if anything needs to be updated. So we all know WordPress is constantly getting updated. So the interface changes. And we have to change the screenshots in our material. So editors keep an eye out on the published content to make sure that is constantly being updated as well. We have translation reviewers who review translations before they are published. And you can probably start to see there are a lot of different people involved in producing a single piece of content. So we have administrators in the center there who connect all the different roles together and make sure they work smoothly to publish content. So if you want to get involved with localization, we have at least six areas here where you can get involved with. But there is one more role I want to point out today and encourage you to apply for. And that is the locale ambassador role. So Learn WordPress has predominantly been producing English content for the last couple of years. And last year we started a new push to get content translated into different languages. So we have different roles within the training team. And if every training team member spoke 200 languages, then we could all just translate the content ourselves. But we don't speak that many languages. And so what we have to do is we need to make connections with the different local WordPress communities to encourage those people to come in and join our efforts to build out these translated contents on Learn. And so we need someone to connect the training team with the local community so that they understand our goals and our passion about translating WordPress. And the local ambassador can also introduce the needs of the community to the training team. So a particular community might have a hard time adopting the block editor. And so they need particular resources about that. Or a particular community might be lacking resources around WordPress development. So they need development related resources. And hopefully the local ambassador can relay that information back to the training team. The training team can make the material. And then they can also encourage the local community to translate the material and send it back. So here we have at least seven roles in order to localize content. And just in case you missed it last time, I want to encourage you to visit this URL. So once again, that's make.wordpress.org slash training slash handbook slash getting started. And if you come here, this will introduce you to these different roles and help you figure out how you can get involved. Our onboarding program is somewhere between 30 and 60 minutes. If you're very new to WordPress contribution, that's totally fine. We will help you set up your Slack account, slap a GitHub account, make your WordPress.org account. But the onboarding program will also walk you through your first contribution. So by the end of the 60 minutes, if you chose the content creator path, you would have got involved with content creation within onboarding. Or if you chose the content translator path, you would have got involved with content translation within that first 60 minutes of onboarding. So I highly recommend you come and try our new onboarding program. Now to wrap up, I do want to introduce one more project the training team is currently working on. And we're calling this the content localization foundations project. So try saying that fast 10 times content localization foundation projects. And what this project is, is by the end of March, so we have about a month and a half left, we have identified 10 most impactful content on learn. And we want to translate these 10 pieces of content into five different languages. So we've chosen 10 pieces. And we want to translate that into five different languages. In order to do that, we need to find local ambassadors so they can connect us with the local communities. We also need to recruit translators and recruit editors. And then we want to translate 10 pieces into five languages. So let me tell you how the project is going. Currently, Gujarati is winning with five out of 10 pieces localized. So give a clap to Gujarati. Hindi has translated four out of 10 pieces. Tamil has translated two out of 10 pieces. And Indonesian has translated one out of 10 pieces. Now the goal was five languages though. And at the moment, we have four languages that have translated content. Now I will say there are some other languages that have started the translation process, but we haven't got anything published yet. So what I want to challenge everyone here today is your language to become this fifth language here. So we still have a spot open. If you're interested in getting involved with this program and getting your language just translating 10 pieces of content in your language, please come to me after this talk and I'll help you get involved. But really, if we can get more than five languages, that would be really wonderful. If we can translate these 10 pieces of content into 10 languages, that would be awesome as well. So if you're interested in getting involved, do let us know. And just in case you haven't written this URL down, I'm showing it one more time. This is your chance to get your phone out and take a picture here. We want you to come join the training team in our localization efforts. And the best way you can do that is to go through our onboarding program and this will show you how to connect with us in Slack, how to give feedback, how to find content to translate. So once again, that URL is make.wordpress.org slash training slash handbook slash getting started. Thank you so much for listening. That is how you can get involved with localizing content on the Law and WordPress website. Thank you very much.