WordPress.org

When would I use this?

The default WordPress archive listing takes one line for every month. Once your blog gets over about a one or two years old, this becomes unwieldy. That's the point where you should consider this plug-in instead. This plug-in only takes two or three lines per year.

When your blog gets to be about 4-6 years old, it will start to get unwieldy again. Hopefully, by then, we will have a solution for that too.

How do I localise it for my language?

The widget automatically uses the first character from each month based on your locale. So all you need to is override the default title to a word meaning 'archives' in your language.

I haven't tested it on any right-to-left languages. If this doesn't work, let me know, and I will come up with a workaround.