http://puu.sh/jnac3/938b725a7f.webm Is this going to be in? I sure hope so!
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I think I’m going to go ahead and quit helping after reading all these comments. While I have done this sort of thing in the past for work, I don’t want to step on people’s toes or create more work for anyone just because they disagree with my changes.
Not to mention, as several have said, without context certain aspects of proofreading and editing the English translations become extremely difficult. Linguistic/grammar rules are heavily context dependent when it comes to the tone or “flavor” of writing. I might know more about grammar rules than the average Joe, but I am by no means an expert authority on the subject.
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I think that the in-game translator will be your best tool in helping if it’s implemented, as it’ll allow you to have things in context. So you might fare better with that…
Yes it’s going to be in.
Yeah I just asked a streamer to try it out in kCBT3 and it seems to work there too.
That’s kind of a unfair claim to make, I didn’t even know that there is a way for people who don’t know korean to help until this week. And honestly, I was very hesistant first with trying to make any changes since I was worried about doing something wrong. But when I actually did something wrong Ensata actually made a comment on my pull request to correct a mistake I made. I didn’t even know about any guidelines until someone pointed them out in this thread either. I suppose I’ll just give up on trying to help for now
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Sorry that was a little harsh. I did not mean it that way. I am not entirely sure if everyone’s doing it for that or its just the excitement of the game launching soon. Just don’t get discouraged. I know it’s a lot to deal with but every little bit helps. Following the guidelines will help a lot to avoid mistakes early on. Think about what you edit before you edit it and you shouldn’t be too worried about mistakes. Don’t take my ignorant comment personally, please.
I am a bit interested in translating Kor > Eng, however, there are a few things that I am worried about. How can you expect professional quality translations from a broad pool of casuals?
Also, shouldn’t translators be paid for their work? Clearly the game intends to make a profit, does it not? So, all the executives and programmers will be paid. Yet, translation does not qualify as a paid profession? I don’t think it’s wrong that posters should ask for some sort of compensation, even if it’s just a in-game title, or in-game currency, considering they are getting a free service that they really should be paying a professional to do.
My last question is about consistency. With such a large pool of contributors, none of which are communicating constantly, aren’t you going to get 10 different item names for the same object, or 3 different spellings for an NPC name?
Don’t get me wrong. I am not trying to be a jerk, or anything. I would definitely like to contribute. I spent 15 years working towards being a paid translator, and I find it disturbing that so many game developers (mostly Steam games) expect this all to be a volunteer service now, with absolutely no in-game perks.
It’s likely related to Tree of Savior being so heavily crowdfunded and extending on Ragnarok’s largely open client; to the development team, it’s extremely convenient for this particular title’s translation to be crowdsourced as well (because all of the client’s text is available to every player anyway.)
The problem, as you’ve mentioned, is the massive swarm of highly amateur contributions. I don’t know Korean myself; I’m useful only for taking the garbled Engrish that comes out and making it pretty. I may also be able to figure out localized replacements for figures of speech, puns, or other things that tend to translate poorly.
As far as I’m aware, you are the first person to outright voice those concerns. I’ve been very aware of it. As for why I still contributed for free… well, it’s a secret to everybody.
That said, I am mostly just waiting for imc to realise for themselves that something is dreadfully wrong with the project. I’ll email them outright after the cbt. I won’t tell you publicly.
Also, as far as I know, Tree of Savior was not crowdfunded at all - and please stop talking about Ragnarok. It’s impolite.
Thanks for the reply. I think I might pass on the project. I keep thinking about some translator not paying their bills this month because of stuff like this. I don’t want to add to the problem. If I run across poor translations while playing the game, which happens in even properly translated games, I’ll consider contributing in that small sort of way.
*** PLEASE READ ***
There is a system in place to prevent stuff like this, of which people in this thread should take a note of. I’m not as active as I once was with the translations (I’ll be on that during the ICBT) due to my bug testing of the KCBT3, but I’ve just noticed a lot of people haven’t been using this system:
Marking Lines That Have Been Edited
Most of the thread is a discussion, but:
For any line you edit and / or proof and then end up with a result where you are confident it sufficient enough to be placed in the game, put an “x” before the line’s number.
ex:
ETC_20150317_000001 -> xETC_20150317_000001
ITEM_20150317_000001 -> xITEM_20150317_000001
QUEST_20150317_000001 -> xQUEST_20150317_000001
Please, please, please do this. Lines with x’s can be proofed if you feel like it, but if all goes correctly, they shouldn’t require further editing.
*** THANK YOU ***
(I’ll post a thread for this tomorrow at a better hour, but hopefully some of you see this now)
My issue with marking lines is that not only is it just ugly to look at, it shouldn’t be needed. People need to actually read the finished lines and think “Okay, this is a legitimate, coherent sentence, I won’t touch it.”
Perhaps we need to put up a list of example lines - what to fix and what not to fix.
In my experience, it seems the longer you work in the project the more you appreciate the work that’s already been done. When I first started working I thought every line that even sounded slightly awkward needed changing, now that I know there are MANY lines that are far worse, I follow a doctrine: if I can understand the line, even if the grammar sucks I ain’t touching it.
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This might be true, but if this were the case for everyone (as it should be - I’m agreeing with you, but…), then we wouldn’t have the issue of everyone editing the first section of lines of every document.
To be honest, I think you guys should just run applications to be accepted into a sort of “open volunteer team” that’s still filtered for fluency in either English or Korean (with both being preferable.) Completely open translation crowdsourcing doesn’t seem to be effective and appears to be draining morale.
A smaller team will be more likely to communicate better anyway, so there should be less “constantly changing the same damn line” and next to no chance of edit wars.
Personally, I think I’ll just keep a local copy of my own edit and, once it has enough volume of actual changed lines, show it to everyone and let them pick. I mean, the client lets you override that stuff locally anyway, right? So it should be quite possible to make user pack translations that players can try out (no effort needed from the devs - they can just be posted on the forums.)
Translation is a long process that involves a lot of trial and error. This means frequently going back over translations and editing them to ensure the quality level of the translation. If you are going to take offense to people doing this and try to enact measures to prevent others from critiquing your work, you are hindering this project.
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In the spirit of collaboration, critiquing others’ work, and not making pull requests that conflict all over each other, here’s the proofreading work I’ve been doing on QUEST.tsv on my two forked branches. I’m posting this here to help get more eyeballs, but for consistency’s sake, it’s best for discussion to happen on Github itself.
Lines 1-700 (existing PR 626)
Lines 701-1100 (no PR cause there were too many)
It seems like a lot of the text past that is machine translated no man’s land, so I thought it would be prudent to stop there. Most of what I changed was grammar, capitalization, keeping a consistent space before newline but not after, changing two/three periods to a single ellipsis glyph, removing spaces and newlines from the ends of lines (should have just done mass replace there), but there was also some cleaning up of wording and a few spots with more heavy rephrasing.
Line 105 seemed pretty iffy, so I tried to use a light touch to restructure it, but it still doesn’t feel quite there to me.
Line 122 has a little commentary in the PR.
Lines 228 and 726: I’m not a huge buff on military terminology, but it seems like the use of detached and dispatched were incorrect. so I changed those to “stationed” and “deployed”.
Lines 841-843: A lesion is very different from a legion.
Line 871: Is “Blue Pondel” a proper noun or something? Is “Black Pond” on 874?
I also changed the third person pronouns for the Goddesses in various places to be capitalized, since “Goddess” itself was capitalized. It seemed like the right thing to do, but it was a big judgment call on my part.
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The problem isn’t that we don’t want people editing our lines; the problem is we are trying to avoid people jumping the gun and over-editing lines so much, that all the detail from the original Korean text could be lost before we play the game and understand the context.
Nobody knows how many passes each line has seen, so while Pass #1 might make the line sound less Engrish-like, every other guy coming in thinking their version is better will whittle the sentence down until by Pass #6 it loses its original meaning. People could also for the sake of “smooth sounding” English add words, risking adding detail not meant to be there.
I have also seen lines go from with commas to without, and then with commas again. Common sense says projects don’t move forward with situations like that.
Will do it asap, nothing better to do than just sit infront of the PC and look at ToS site haha 
regards!