The WordPress meta team announced that they will be adding themes and plugins translations to translate.wordpress.org. This is great news for anyone running Non-English WordPress sites and multilingual WordPress sites. WPML will follow this development closely and add the corresponding support in WPML.
This change will make running multilingual sites a lot easier. Many times today, it’s been hard to find good translations for your theme and all the plugins that you’re using. When WordPress will allow translators to work on theme and plugin translations in one centralized location, we should see a lot more (and better) translations for everything.
Besides the technical advantages to authors, end users should expect more translations, to more languages with higher quality and more complete.
We’ll work to make WPML play with this new mechanism. WPML will automatically download translations for all the site’s languages from the central repository. These translations can arrive as .mo files or into the String Translation, allowing local edits.
This is exciting news for multilingual WordPress. We’ll follow the development closely and update you when there’s something ready for testing.
We hope that the WordPress themes team will open this translation system to all themes, not only those coming from WordPress.org. This will help all of us. To make your voice, consider visiting the announcement blog post (requires registration) or the unofficial announcement on wptavern (no registration needed) and leaving your comment. Explain why it’s important to you, as a WordPress developer and user, to see translations for all themes on translate.wordpress.org.