Introduction
Thank you, for considering helping out with localizing our favourite Blogging / Content Management platform software to Canadian English (locale code en_CA).
The Core, Meta, and Polygots WordPress community are making WordPress even more friendly and local for end users and all translatable themes and plugins are now being uploaded to GlotPress. GlotPress is a web-based translation tool that is used for automatic language pack creation and distribution. If you have a WordPress.org login you can translate strings here https://translate.wordpress.org/locale/en-ca if not you can create one at https://wordpress.org/support.
Helping Out
Core WordPress is built in American English (locale code en_US), most plug-ins and themes are as well or are assumed to be by WordPress. We need lots of help to translate thousands of text strings. For 99% of them they will be just a copy of the original string. If they can be made more Canadian then here is the basic guide. Anyone can help from anywhere at any time, if your translations are good, we may choose to invite you to be a Translation Editor (TE) which will mean your strings will not need validation, and you can validate the strings from others. If you are a plug-in author and you want to have TE access we have a guide on how we handle these requests.
The Canadian Style
For the most part we follow “The Canadian Style” as outlined by the Translation Bureau of Government of Canada. (http://www.btb.termiumplus.gc.ca/tcdnstyl-chap?lang=eng&lettr=chapsect1&info0=1#zz1)
Names of cities used in examples like “Los Angeles” is replaced with a Canadian community name. We tend to change the city name from time to time to not show bias. However, it is usually a Canadian city that has hosted a WordCamp.
We also have a glossary available here. (https://translate.wordpress.org/locale/en-ca/default/glossary)
We also tend to be slightly more formal and replace some strings while keeping the “fun” for example, an error message “Cheatin’ huh?” to “Cheatin’ eh?”.
Another wonderful resource that provides a table comparing spelling between Canadian, American and British locales can be found here;
(http://www.lukemastin.com/testing/spelling/cgi-bin/database.cgi?action=home)
Term Consistency
Some work is being done to make consistent use of terms across WordPress, Themes, and Plug-ins. The below table is the standard Canadian English form of the following terms.
| String | Canadian English Standardization |
| back-end / backend / back end | back-end (n.) |
| callback/call-back/call back | callback |
| changelog / change log | change log |
| e-commerce / ecommerce | ecommerce |
| e-mail / email | |
| fallback/fall-back/fall back | fallback |
| front-end / frontend / front end | front-end (n. i.e. shown on the front-end) |
| front-end / frontend / front end | front-end (adj. i.e. front-end developer) |
| home page / homepage | home page |
| log in / log-in / login | login (n. i.e. the login screen) |
| log in / log-in / login | log in (v. log in here) |
| robots.txt / Robots.txt | robots.txt |
| roadmap/road map | roadmap |
| rollout/roll-out | rollout |
| rollback / roll back | rollback |
| sitemap.xml / Sitemap.xml | sitemap.xml |
| style sheet / stylesheet | style sheet |
| toolbar/tool-bar/tool bar | toolbar |
| 5MB / 5 MB (space before units) | 5 MB |
Also the below capitalization is used among all WordPress English localizations teams.
| Ajax |
| CSS |
| JavaScript |
| jQuery |
| PHP |
| SEO |
| URL |
| WordPress |