Thank you Sarah :)

And thank you Nao and Shin and all the amazing Japanese contributors out there. You're an inspiration to us all.

Many of you might not know, but when in 2014 international downloads of WordPress surpassed English downloads, Japanese actually constituted almost 1/3 of those international downloads. This only goes to show what the impact of WordPress can be in regions where English is not widely spread.

WordPress is not even 100% translated into some of the top 10 most spoken languages like Hindi and Bengali yet. The Indian languages are quite poorly represented and imagine the impact that part of the world can have on the project.

Time difference is only one of the restrictions for non-English speaking communities to get involved more. For the Polyglots team, we tried having two weekly chats, one for Europe, South America and East Asia (most locales are in that region) and one for the Asia / Pacific region. We thought this might help more people from that region to get actively involved, but the Asia / Pacific chat was not popular at all.

Very soon it dawned on us that language was actually what stopped people from actively participating. We had constant feedback about that.

Imo translating the development handbooks, the codex, all the documentation and using the local wp.org sites to rally contributors is the step forward. Plugin and Theme directories in local languages will help too.

Caspar's idea about people from different regions owning small parts of the project sounds really great. Even if development is always centred around English, we can probably use tools to bridge the language barrier and work together.

Thank you again for the fantastic write up, Sarah.