Add language setting for plugin owners and make them PTE for their own plugins/themes automatically

[daveshine]

It would be an improvement to have a language setting on the user profile for each WordPress.org user who is a plugin and/or a theme author.

This should be for his/her native language (mother tongue).

When this language field is set to a language/locale the author automatically becomes PTE for all his plugins and/or themes on .org for this one specified locale.

This would save the whole cumbersome process of PTE requests for one's own plugins/themes and his/her own native language.

Maybe this could also be extended to a second language as there are a lot of people who speak two languages fluently or were raised bilingual. Or a system with a primary and a secondary language.

My personal example:
I would set "German" as my native language (my mother tongue) which has these 2 locales included: de_DE and de_DE_formal. And I would automaticcally be the PTE for all my plugins for this language including these 2 locales.

[webaware]

In this scenario, could a plugin author change their language setting and become PTE for another language easily? And then another? And change back? Because they will :)

[daveshine]

Replying to webaware:

In this scenario, could a plugin author change their language setting and become PTE for another language easily? And then another? And change back? Because they will :)

The setting could be made to setup once only and then freeze it for further change. Those who need/want to change this could then email the team.

In my opinion the vast majority of users won't abuse this. Those abusers always need "special care" (or ignorance) in any scenario.

[audrasjb]

Hello,

In my opinion, the main issue is that the fact of being native of a language doesn't provides any guarantee that the person will follow the translation guidelines of his Locale… so automatic PTE is not a good thing in many case: translators have to follow some guidelines to get PTE status, and it has to be checked by local polyglots teams.

Of course, when people are already PTE for some projects, we often grant them PTE status directly when they ask :)

Cheers,

Jb

[Presskopp]

Same as #4. We want to adhere a decent quality standard so anybody can benefit, the author, the translators, the users etc. When you are PTE and you proved yourself of being capable of doing exact translations you can ask for getting PTE for all projects so you don't need to ask anymore. If speaking a language would mean mastering it, we would't need bookshelfs full with books about grammar etc.

[fxbenard]

Same as above and above, it’s an old discussion. Being native speaker doesn’t mean being a translator. It will probably increase the translation process but definitely not the whole quality.

[daveshine]

Not convinced.
The current processes are cumbersome and not very friendly for plugin authors. Most plugin and theme authors I am in contact with don't know much about all these processes etc. (most don't know anything at all). Because they find it all too difficult they never request PTE and all that.

To me it feels a bit like that all energy is "only" put on the quality and optimizing and simplyfying the whole processes seems not (so much) on the table.

Don't get me wrong, the quality of translations is important and I fought for this years before the whole language pack thing was in place etc. However, I still see so many translations out of the context that shows to me that a lot of the current processes seem not to work quality-wise - in my opinion.

As a plugin author I want full control over the translations of MY native language for MY own plugin. At best this should be default and an automated process therefore the suggestion in this ticket.

[ocean90]

Closing for the same reason as in #1338. Nothing has changed on this matter.

[daveshine]

Ha, I wasn't even able to find my old ticket here in Trac (since Trac is a UX desaster of its own).

I would be interested in these discussions and its results that were mentioned by Samuel Sidler. Is this documented somewhere?

Again, my suggestions years ago and now are to make things for plugin authors more easy and friendly.