Consistency between translators

Uru Localization Project

Consistency between translators

Postby Jutt » Fri Aug 19, 2011 8:22 am

I noticed something I think needs consideration. Since for most languages there are more than one person working on translations, there is the risk of some inconsistencies being created between them. I've seen a few for the Dutch translations so far, and I was wondering how we should deal with this. Some examples:

Formality. Unlike English, Dutch has distinct formal and informal personal pronouns (je/jij vs. u etc.). These are often used in interface texts, but so far I have seen both formal and informal being used in translations. I think a convention on formality is desired here.

Terminology. There are several Myst and Uru specific words that should always be translated the same to avoid confusion. Some however have multiple translations, or no natural translation at all, which makes it hard to consistently translate them.
Examples would be words like "age", "explorer", "imager", "the Cleft", "the Fissure", guild names, location names, etc.; some of these I have already seen translated to Dutch in different ways. Again, standardized terminology seems necessary.

So, should we start worrying about this yet, or are we going to address it later with all translations finished?
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Re: Consistency between translators

Postby Luna » Fri Aug 19, 2011 9:18 am

I was actually just mentioning to OHB that it would be nice to be able to discuss standards for specific languages :P

Yeah I have noticed inconsistence in dutch translations too, I think we should have a discussion on it like I had for the translations on the Messengers' website.

First of all formality, I have been using "u" myself (I hope) because it are usually rather formal texts and it is more polite.

Terminology : I'm divided on this one, on the GoMe website I don't translate a lot of the terminology at all, most people recognize and use the english terms anyway. However I can imagine this is unwanted for ULP in which case we should set some standards. I would say we should do it sooner then later then we can check older translations and do it right from now on :)
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Re: Consistency between translators

Postby Floydman » Fri Aug 19, 2011 9:46 am

I could see something like this being added onto the site. Imagine that each language has a page where specific standards are set forth. We could discuss the standards here, but they would be set in stone there. So far, I have been basing my own translation of words like "star fissure" or "age" on what others have written.

The word "Age", I believe, refers more to a certain time period than to a time of existence ("The Dark Ages" vs. "His age is 17 years.")
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Re: Consistency between translators

Postby OHB » Fri Aug 19, 2011 1:55 pm

I had an idea that could address this. What if each language had a leader? Someone who is an expert on a specific language who can make the decisions that are specific to that language. It would be that person's responsibility to point out consistency errors. Also, they'd get additional powers such as (off the top of my head):

1. The ability to make an item require additional votes before winning.
2. To revert a Winning translation to a pending translation.
3. To modify submitted translations in order to correct spelling, capitalization, punctuation, and perhaps terminology.
4. Have their own page where they can put and edit a document with guildlines for translating to a specific language.

Those are just ideas. But the Leaders would be on a per language per project basis. So, the Dutch Leader for URU would be different from the Dutch Leader for Riven. (Unless they /happen/ to hold both positions)

Something along those lines anyway. Thoughts? Anyone want to take that idea and run with it?
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Re: Consistency between translators

Postby Luna » Fri Aug 19, 2011 2:43 pm

As we're all volunteers I would rather see that everyone has the same rights. Also as not everyone necessarily knows each other or visits the same forums, deciding who should become the leader would be hard.
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Re: Consistency between translators

Postby OHB » Fri Aug 19, 2011 3:16 pm

Luna wrote:As we're all volunteers I would rather see that everyone has the same rights. Also as not everyone necessarily knows each other or visits the same forums, deciding who should become the leader would be hard.


Yeah, I agree. That's the reason I never mentioned it before. My base position on these things is usually "figure it out among yourselves", but if ya'll say "yeah please give us a leader that can organize us" then I don't really have an issue with it. I'd suggest that it should only happen if people nominate someone who accepts the role. Otherwise I suppose one could be appointed by me...but I'm not huge with that idea either.
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Re: Consistency between translators

Postby Jutt » Fri Aug 19, 2011 3:24 pm

The idea of a project leader sounds good to me, but the decisions on standards should not be made by this person alone. I think the collective of translators should mostly agree on what standards are being used. The leader will only catalogue and enforce them.

But in general a project leader (or maybe more than one per project?) could do tasks that are otherwise hard to delegate between all the contributors. Checking spelling, capitalization and naming conventions are indeed some of them. The translation process would be more efficient if you don't have to submit a new translation for every little mistake — just post a comment and a leader can take care of it. After all I think we can't be sure users will keep up with all the rules and correct their translations themselves.

Oh, maybe call them moderators — seems to describe de job well and sounds less like they have a higher rank than other contributors.



Wow, this forum has a nifty post collision alert system. So if more people are opposed to this idea, we could also leave it as is, have a discussion page on standards and see if we can all sort it out through comments…
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Re: Consistency between translators

Postby OHB » Fri Aug 19, 2011 4:01 pm

Jutt wrote:The idea of a project leader sounds good to me, but the decisions on standards should not be made by this person alone. I think the collective of translators should mostly agree on what standards are being used. The leader will only catalogue and enforce them.

But in general a project leader (or maybe more than one per project?) could do tasks that are otherwise hard to delegate between all the contributors. Checking spelling, capitalization and naming conventions are indeed some of them. The translation process would be more efficient if you don't have to submit a new translation for every little mistake — just post a comment and a leader can take care of it. After all I think we can't be sure users will keep up with all the rules and correct their translations themselves.

Oh, maybe call them moderators — seems to describe de job well and sounds less like they have a higher rank than other contributors.



Wow, this forum has a nifty post collision alert system. So if more people are opposed to this idea, we could also leave it as is, have a discussion page on standards and see if we can all sort it out through comments…


Alright. Language Moderators then. Also, the ability to edit a post without losing comments is coming.

If it would help, we can do other forum-y stuff. We could either a) create lots of sub-forums, perhaps one per language where these things can be discussed. Or, if we need more control, perhaps having a ULP specific forum is on the cards. That might make more sense - we could do tie-ins with language pages...and we could have Language Leaders with the ability to sticky forum posts, etc.

I'm not opposed to this idea. Perhaps it is time to do so. Thoughts?
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Re: Consistency between translators

Postby Christian Walther » Sat Aug 20, 2011 2:54 pm

OHB wrote:1. The ability to make an item require additional votes before winning.
2. To revert a Winning translation to a pending translation.
3. To modify submitted translations in order to correct spelling, capitalization, punctuation, and perhaps terminology.

As a side note, some of these powers could be useful for project managers too – or similar ones, like To mark an entry as winning regardless of its and others’ score. I’ve been doing than manually in the export output for now. For example, here (check Swedish or French) I want to match a built-in string of the OS, so that one wins regardless of what other valid translations may be.
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Re: Consistency between translators

Postby OHB » Sat Aug 20, 2011 11:22 pm

Christian Walther wrote:
OHB wrote:1. The ability to make an item require additional votes before winning.
2. To revert a Winning translation to a pending translation.
3. To modify submitted translations in order to correct spelling, capitalization, punctuation, and perhaps terminology.

As a side note, some of these powers could be useful for project managers too – or similar ones, like To mark an entry as winning regardless of its and others’ score. I’ve been doing than manually in the export output for now. For example, here (check Swedish or French) I want to match a built-in string of the OS, so that one wins regardless of what other valid translations may be.


Actually, there's a different functionality to handle that already. I've locked the two translations you mentioned above. Once I get around to it, I'll give PMs the ability to do that.
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