Today, I’m stepping down from my role as a GTE (General Translation Editor) for the Turkish WordPress community, after a decade of volunteering.
It started in 2016, shortly after I returned from WordCamp Europe in Vienna. Somehow, a decade has passed since then.
A Decade of Strings
What started as simply contributing translations somewhere along the way became part of my relationship with WordPress itself. Over the years, I reviewed countless translations, argued over strings, tried to figure out how something that sounded perfectly natural in English could possibly sound equally natural in Turkish, and probably spent far more time thinking about terminology than any reasonable person should.
There were countless nights spent translating, reviewing, discussing, and trying to make WordPress feel a little more natural for Turkish users. Some strings took seconds, others somehow turned into long discussions about wording, context, and whether anyone would actually say that sentence in Turkish. Looking back, I’m glad we spent those nights that way.
The Slightly Ironic Part
I’ve always been a believer in eating your own dog food. Most of the tools and products I build start with something I personally want to use, so there is a certain irony in what happened next.
Somewhere around 2018, English gradually became the default language for almost everything in my life. My computers, phone, TV, pretty much every piece of gear I own, and of course WordPress itself have all been set to English for years. The same shift happened professionally, to the point where almost all of my day-to-day communication, writing, documentation, and reading is now in English.
So, at some point, I found myself responsible for the Turkish translation of software I hadn’t actually used in Turkish for years.
That disconnect slowly made translation work harder to prioritize. It started to feel less like eating my own dog food and more like cooking a meal I no longer eat. Sitting down to review translations became something I had to deliberately make time for rather than something that naturally fit into my workflow.
That is probably a good sign that it’s time to move on.
No Lifetime Appointments
There is another, much simpler reason: I’m not in my twenties anymore.
Time has become a more valuable and considerably scarcer resource. Between work, my own projects, life, and everything else I still want to do, it has become harder to justify holding onto a volunteer responsibility when I know I can no longer give it the attention I once could.
And there is no point in clinging to a seat forever like a politician. At some point, you have to know when it is time to hand over the chair and make room for someone else. After a decade, this feels like the right time for me to do exactly that.
The Special Thanks Part
I especially want to thank Emre, Türker, and Çağdaş. A decade is long enough that the people you share the journey with become as memorable as the work itself, and a lot of what I remember from these years has very little to do with the actual strings we translated.
Thank you for the conversations, collaboration, disagreements, laughs, countless late nights, and all the small moments behind the scenes that made being part of this community worthwhile.
And thank you to everyone in the Turkish WordPress community I crossed paths with along the way.
Still Around, Unfortunately
None of this means I’m leaving WordPress or its community. You’ll still find me in the WordPress Türkiye Slack, at events, and probably in many of the same places as before. I’ll still be building WordPress plugins, contributing where I can, and finding other ways to be part of the ecosystem, even if, admittedly, with somewhat less motivation than I had ten years ago.
WordPress has been a significant part of my professional life for a long time, and stepping down as a GTE does not really change that.
I’ll still be building things with WordPress, breaking things, complaining about things in WordPress, and occasionally even contributing something useful.
I just won’t be wearing the GTE hat anymore.
One chapter has simply reached its natural ending.
So long, and thanks for all the fish. 🐬
Leave a Reply