Post2. Setup and First Access: Translating Astra into Costa Rican Spanish

Accessing the translation platform

With my WordPress.org account already set up, the next step was accessing translate.wordpress.org and finding the Astra theme strings for the es_CR locale. The direct URL is: translate.wordpress.org/projects/wp-themes/astra/es-cr/default/

First contact with the strings

Once inside, I filtered by “Untranslated” to see only the strings that still needed work. The Astra theme has a significant number of untranslated strings in es_CR, which confirms that this locale needs contributors. Each string shows the original English text and an empty field where the Spanish translation goes.

First translations submitted

I submitted my first 10 translations today. The process is straightforward: click on a string, type the Spanish translation in the field, and click “Suggest”. The translation then goes into a pending state, waiting for approval by a Translation Editor from the es_CR team.

A few things I kept in mind while translating: preserve any variables like %s or %d exactly as they appear, use natural Costa Rican Spanish instead of literal translations, and keep the same tone as the original string.

What comes next

In the next post I’ll document my first full batch of translations with more detail on specific strings and the decisions I made while translating.