The collaborative translation system has been with BGA almost from the start to allow as many people as possible throughout the world to play together with no language barrier. We are quite happy and proud about it, but of course it's not perfect.
With more than 150 games - and translations happening in 35 languages - we tried to see what we could fix or do better.
1) With so many translations, fixing mistakes in validated translations has become tedious. Doing it manually when reported by players in the forums was slow and time consuming. So we decided to trust the community some more, and to allow players to fix validated strings directly if they have enough experience on BGA and on the game. Please be aware that fixing validated translations doesn't award any gift points, and should be done only to correct clear and obvious mistakes. It's best not to make changes you are not sure of, and always stay as close as possible to the original English text in meaning and style.
2) For some languages there is not a lot of translators and we wanted to try to make things easier, so we thought that it would be faster for translators to proofread and correct than to translate everything. So when possible (which means when there is no substitution parameter involved making the text dynamic), we will now propose a computer generated translation by default, and then translators will be able to either make changes to improve it as usual, or just to confirm it in one click if it's already good! These default translations will appear progressively in the weeks to come, and this new functionnality should allow us in the future to open the website in more languages for which we don't currently have enough players to bootstrap a translation, and maybe spark interest for players in these languages.
Let's be clear, this is absolutely not meant to replace the current community based translation system! We really need the translators help in translating dynamic strings and in proofreading the translations to have them meet the "human quality" level that creates a smooth and natural play experience.
3) Even with good intentions, some mistakes were made by translators making changes to the original English text. And that was really a bummer, because mistakes propagate to all languages afterwards... So for English, we decided to set up a validation step to avoid mistakes. If you spot something incorrect in the English version of the website or in an English text you are currently translating, you can look for that text in the "from English to English" translation system, and propose a change (with a comment!). This change will then be validated (or refused) by the BGA team.
4) Since we didn't think about setting up specific guidelines about punctuation, some translators added or removed final punctuation a little anarchically over the years, for example adding an ending dot for text used in buttons (Yikes! 😯 ). We homogenized that to get back to the intention of the developer in terms of meaning expressed through punctuation and clarity of the interface (a website is not a book). Now we also trigger a warning if the final punctuation is changed: translators reported some cases where it can be legitimate, so it can still be done, but please be careful with this, it should stay exceptional!
Thanks again to all translators from the community contributing their time to allow players from all over the world to enjoy playing board games in their native language!
Really. That's awesome! 😁
關於翻譯系統的一些消息!
協作翻譯系統幾乎從一開始就在 BGA 上,盡可能讓全世界更多的人在沒有語言障礙的情況下一起玩。
我們為此感到相當開心和自豪,但也覺得翻譯系統並不完美。
隨著超過 150 款遊戲的登陸 - 以及 35 種語言的翻譯 - 我們正在嘗試尋找我們能解決或是可以做得更好的地方。
1)有這麼多的翻譯,修復錯誤翻譯的驗證已經變得過於冗長。
從論壇的玩家們回報再修正翻譯緩慢又耗時。
所以我們決定更信任社區,如果玩家在 BGA 和遊戲上有足夠的經驗,將允許他們直接修復經過驗證的字串。
請注意,修復經過驗證的翻譯不會授予任何禮品積分,並且應該只為了糾正清楚和明顯的錯誤而進行。
最好不要做出你不確定的改變,並在意義和風格上盡可能地貼近英文的原文。
2)對於某些語言沒有很多的翻譯人員, 我們想嘗試使事情變得更容易, 所以我們認為, 校對與更正翻譯比起翻譯全部要來的更快。
因此, 在可能的情況下 (這意味著在沒有替換參數的情況下, 需要使文本動態), 我們現在將在預設情況下提出電腦生成的翻譯, 然後翻譯人員將能夠進行更改, 就像之前一樣改進它, 或著只要覺得翻譯已經很好時,點擊確認即可!
這些預設翻譯將會在未來幾周內逐步出現, 而這種新功能應該能讓我們在未來打開網站時,有更多的語言可以選擇, 而我們目前還沒有足夠的玩家來引導翻譯, 也許這項舉動可以激發使用這些語言的玩家的翻譯興趣。
讓我們澄清一點,這絕對不是為了取代現前基於社區的翻譯系統!
我們確實需要翻譯人員的説明來翻譯動態字串和校對翻譯, 使它們能達到"給人看" 的水準,從而創造流暢和自然的遊戲體驗。
3)即便有良好的意願, 翻譯也會在對原文進行修改時犯了一些錯誤。
而那確實會是一個麻煩,因為錯誤會在之後散播到所有的語言...
因此, 對於英語, 我們決定設置一個驗證步驟, 來避免錯誤。
如果你在網站的英文版本或當前正在翻譯的英文文本中發現不正確的內容, 您可以在 "從英文到英文" 翻譯系統中查找該文本, 並提出更改(帶有注釋!)。
然後,BGA 團隊將驗證 (或拒絕) 此次更改。
4)由於我們沒有考慮設置有關於標點符號的特定準則, 多年來,一些翻譯者為了添加或刪除了最後的標點符號而造成混亂, 例如為按鈕中的文字添加一個句點 (Yikes!
)。
我們一致地認為,要從標點符號表達的意思以及介面的清晰這兩方面回歸作者的想法(網站不是一本書)。
現在,如果更改了最後的標點符號,我們也會觸發警告:但翻譯人員回報過一些合理的更改,所以仍然可以這麼做,但請注意,它應該是例外!
再次感謝來自社區的所有翻譯人員貢獻他們的時間,讓來自世界各地的玩家能以自己的母語享受桌遊!
真的。
太棒了!