Localization - a cause for rebellion

Discussion in 'Localization Archives' started by Duke Olahorand, Aug 4, 2016.

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  1. ZeCarlos

    ZeCarlos Localization Team

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    @DarkStarr, I appreciate your sincerity in this topic. I work as PO in a major Brazilian regional development bank and I know how difficult having to prioritize the efforts of their development team in an important work front when there are other so as urgent.

    My colleagues from the other localization teams, I am of the Portuguese, they have talked about the suffering that is rework. I understand them perfectly. It is not easy after a hard day's work, come home and spend a precious part of their time on a volunteer translation work, and see it literally thrown in the trash after the upload with updated strings. See my example: were four volunteers. One left the team for personal reasons, two were angry with the sudden disappearance of some translated books and nearly a thousand translated strings and dropped to contribute. Not to mention the effort that had to recruit them, train them in GetLocalization and align our way of working in some virtual meetings. After all we can translate all the help, Interfaces, Skills, scripts and items. Missing a few days to launch'm surprised just after completing the review of helps, with thousands of new items, changes in help structure and obviously very rework ahead, this time alone...

    I will not even talk about a lot of silence (check bugs, typos report, etc.) in our area of the Forum, which leaves us in a very hurt way, we are volunteers but we take the quality of our work very seriously.

    In this sense would suggest simple actions:

    1) To be more transparent with us. We are mature enough to understand certain priorities of the development team.
    2) Send new strings with a certain advance, especially if they involve changes in the HELP ITEMS, UI, short points that directly impact the quality of the game for our colleagues depend on the translation.
    3) Please go through when a post reporting bugs, typos or questions, answer us even if it is a promise that "this day I can read it here quietly." How about a backlog of localization bugs / typo?
    4) In advise if sending an avalanche of strings corrected so we can make backups of those strings that took hours of study and translation, as our tool can not involve major changes from past translations.

    Saudações!
     
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  2. Katrina Bekers

    Katrina Bekers Localization Team

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    I'd just love for GL to have a way to mark an updated string as just updated and NOT new.

    "Hey, translator, the long ass text you finished yesterday had one word changed today (and we'll show you which one with a big fat ass highlight of the color you chose), but we didn't delete your translation, just tagged it 'outdated', and left it for your editors to fix it. KTHXBYE."

    This feature alone would save us INSANE amount of (re-re-re-re-...)work.
     
  3. Duke Olahorand

    Duke Olahorand Localization Team

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    Indeed - one single character corrected due to a typo shows the string as new. Usually in those cases these are still in translation memory, but you have to spot those changed strings first (which is hard in files with thousands of strings). And how long localization memory holds stuff, we don't know, as we don't know basically anything behind the interface. But already an added or removed {Gender=?} tag in the beginning is often enough for Asset to not show up in localization memory. (And adding each asset item to Glossary to cover that is insane too, isn't it ;) )

    *Salute*
    Olahorand
     
  4. Duke Olahorand

    Duke Olahorand Localization Team

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    Hail,
    we are now in almost in the middle of 4th quarter and near the end of the first year after starting localization. The only kind of devotion we currently see is setting "localization on pause" to search for a different platform. While this is eventually nice, if it works without data loss there are still added plenty of new strings to the project on the old platform and questions of translators via PM regarding this are not answered at all.

    So let me say, that in my opinion the current development is dangerous for the intention, to get the localization mainly done by the community.
    I repeat it here:
    So one pillar of the localization project just crushed down - the platform.
    This also again very seriously touches the next pillar... trust and motivation of your volunteers. (You can analyze the statistics in getlocalization for seeing the impact already, since within this one year there has almost nothing been done at all, to satisfy the needs of this pillar.)
    The third pillar has not been raised since before the rebellion... cooperation of devs (Keyword issues, string composition, continuous access to a fluidly updated language environment on QA server or all the open questions in getlocalization interface about meanings etc as example). Cooking in the own juice is unhealthy.

    And the load on those broken pillars in form of growing numbers of text to be localized grows and grows... Time is the glue, which matters for all the pillars... not enough of it will break them as reliable as having nothing (and the time of the year with more time for work for many of your remaining volunteers just started!).

    *Keeps the flag of rebellion for improvement of localization support sooner than later flowing and waits for the catapults of the royal and dark forces firing back*

    *Salute*
    Olahorand
    The Rebel Duke
     
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