Jeshua Quesada

Post 9: WPCredits Final Report – Jeshua Quesada

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Jeshua Quesada
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1 Introduction

Hi everyone! I’m Jeshua Quesada, a Computer Systems Engineering student at Universidad Fidélitas, Costa Rica, and I’m glad to share my final report for the WPCredits course. This report summarizes my contributions to the WordPress Polyglots team, the challenges I faced, and the skills I gained. I hope my experience inspires others to contribute to open source projects.

2 Teams and Projects I Contributed To

Teams: Polyglots Team (es_CR locale)

Project focus: I focused on translating WordPress themes and a plugin from English into Spanish (Costa Rica), applying the official es_CR glossary to keep terminology consistent across the locale. My goal was to help make WordPress more accessible to Spanish-speaking users in Costa Rica by improving the quality and coverage of es_CR translations.

I contributed to 21 projects in total:

  • 20 free WordPress themes (including the Beauty Parlour TWP, Automobile, Business, Education, Event, and Experon theme families)
  • 1 WordPress plugin, Rooster One (AI eShop Optimizer), covering both its Development (trunk) and Stable (latest release) sub-projects

3 Learning Resources

Guides and tutorials: I relied on the official How to Translate guide from Learn WordPress, the es_CR locale glossary (downloaded as a CSV reference), and the translate.wordpress.org interface documentation for handling placeholders, singular/plural strings, and HTML tags within translatable content.

Mentorship: My mentor helped me get started with setting up my own portfolio website, which made it much easier to move forward with the project instead of getting stuck on the technical setup.

4 Challenges and Solutions

Challenge 1 — Identifying what should and shouldn’t be translated. At the start, I wasn’t sure whether theme names, developer names, or URLs needed translation. I solved this by comparing patterns across many strings and learning that product names, brand names, and technical identifiers are always left untranslated, the same way «iPhone» stays «iPhone» in Spanish.

Challenge 2 — Handling technical string formats. Working on a large plugin (Rooster One, 300+ strings) introduced me to placeholders (%s, %d, %1$s), singular/plural string pairs, and embedded HTML tags like <strong>. I resolved this by carefully studying each string’s structure before translating, making sure placeholders stayed in the exact same position and format.

Challenge 3 — Getting my translations reviewed. Submitting a translation doesn’t mean it gets approved automatically, translation editors don’t receive notifications for new strings. I requested review by publishing posts on the Make/Polyglots blog tagged with #es_CR, which successfully reached the es_CR team.

5 My Contributions

Links:

Screenshots: Before/after — Rooster One project page showing my translation status changing from «Waiting» (0% translated) to «Translated» (300 strings approved, 4% overall project progress).

[Insert screenshot of the Translation Contributors table showing 600 total / 600 translated]

6 Key Takeaways from the WPCredits Course

Course highlights:

  • I learned the importance of collaborative work in open source projects — a submitted translation is only complete once it passes community review.
  • I learned to work with a shared glossary to maintain terminology consistency across an entire locale, not just a single project.
  • I learned that technical translation (placeholders, plurals, HTML) requires a different level of care than translating plain descriptive text.

Community: Through the Make/Polyglots blog, I connected with an active reviewer from the es_CR team, Rita Robles Loaiza, who confirmed she would review my theme submissions. This was my first real interaction with the global WordPress community beyond documentation, and it made the whole experience feel tangible rather than abstract.

7 New Skills Acquired

Technical skills: Practical experience with the WordPress translation platform (translate.wordpress.org), handling gettext-style placeholders and plural forms, and applying a locale-specific glossary consistently across dozens of strings.

Soft skills: Patience with community-driven review timelines, clear written communication when requesting reviews from volunteers, and self-directed troubleshooting when encountering unfamiliar string formats.

8 Personal Reflections and Next Steps

Experience: What surprised me most was how real and responsive the community turned out to be. I expected translating software to be a solitary, mechanical task, but it ended up being a genuinely collaborative process. Seeing my Rooster One translations move from «Waiting» to «Translated» was the most rewarding moment of the whole project.

Future goals: I plan to keep contributing to the es_CR Polyglots team beyond this course, and I’m considering applying for Project Translation Editor (PTE) status on a specific plugin now that I better understand the full review workflow. I’d love to hear from others who have contributed to WordPress, feel free to reach out.

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