You may have noticed that Drupal 8 RC1 was released last week. Great news! What does this mean for translators though? Well, quite a lot. The software interface strings in Drupal 8 are now frozen, which means that only error corrections, removals or additions of whole strings, and fixes required for critical issues may be made from this point forward.

This means that if you put off translating Drupal 8, you should not delay it anymore. Drupal 8 is the most multilingual Drupal release by far, and it would be amazing to celebrate that on release day with full translations in your language too. The new version is also a beast, it has almost twice as many strings to translate as Drupal 7 (almost 8500 vs. 4660).

To get going with Drupal 8 translations, we created a Drupal 8 landing page where you can track translation status for each language at https://localize.drupal.org/translate/drupal8. Congratulations to the Ukrainian team for sustaining a fully translated Drupal 8 for quite some time! However, Spanish, Hungarian, Danish and Finnish are coming up fast too! Use the language links on the page to jump right into translating to your language or read instructions in the sidebar about joining a team if you are not yet a member.

All the translations are automatically exported on our side, downloaded by your Drupal 8 site when installed (plus updates automatically imported later), so translators had never had faster time to market with their work. Now is the time to catch up with core translations, so they will be there on launch day! There is at least a few weeks to go before the Drupal 8 release, but hopefully not too many. Happy translating!