Stop giving rewards for translating

[Agranite]

Honestly, although the open source translation has its own flaw system, it also has its own benefits.

The con is the inconsistency in translations, especially from lack of organizations. light novel and web novel translation group has a lot of experience in this field since they divide up the chapters. There will be a glossary list to keep things consistent. They also have a proof reader to make sure that the English translation is correct, and an editor to check the English translation is smooth and grammar is correct. Some translator follow a certain rule, everything is in past tense, while all speech is in present tense. A translator at IMC is probably verifying translation and consistency, managing the pull request.

The pro is that fans can translate the text to their own local language, which would rarely have games progress to their region.

Really getting fed up with tablet autocorrect when swiping

[Sixaxis]

Well, an OBT scheduled date isn’t even in sight for any version, so at the moment the “Engrish Experience” isn’t that big of a deal.

However, if IMC still has to rely on public translation/correction after the game has launched, then we have a serious problem here.

[kuvisit]

@Sixaxis this is by far the most reasonable opinion I have seen in this thread. Open translations help a lot but they’re just something to start with. I think they will do something more professional in the end not to repeat past mistakes.

I still think ToS’s translation is already better than RO’s. We can only go up from here.

[soramaru]

Talking about sloppy translation…I found this a few days ago.

I didn’t want to complain about this initially (since I wasn’t contributing to the translation) but since someone brought this up…So…Yeah. The goddess sure knows how to have fun!

P/S relics are now ‘holy’ and no longer ‘sexual’ for those concerned.

[Yuusha]

I love the idea of open source projects. This translation task is essentially IMC telling the community “hey the more you help us, the faster we can release this game”. So the idea of rewarding translators is great. And hopefully this the last iCBT so fraudulent translators have no incentives for this shoddy translation.

Even if translators are going smoothly, does IMC provide context on the tone/mood of the translated character? That would be great to keep through a translation. I would rather not have perfect English speaking npcs that are 1 dimensional

[Agranite]

I wonder if the translators will go far with the translation and alter it to give personality to the NPC, and to be honest, I’m not against it either ^^; But there might be some debate and conflicts between the translators if they do do it.

[merru]

I’ve fixed that in github
I noticed that’s there’s way too many machine translated in there…what a lazy people …sheesh >.>

[Agranite]

That depends. Is it direct copy & paste translations from MTL, or did they actually try to fix the Engrish after getting the translation from multiple MTL? Well from that image, it looks like a direct copy & paste from MTL.

[sebastian_sanders199]

Bro, U’ve never seen sexual relics?!

[AmenoMiragu]

Wow, it’s sad there’s so much negativity here without knowing the full story.

Currently, if you see machine-translated lines, you can safely say those lines have been there for a while; imcGames thought way back they could help supplement the community by providing them, but they didn’t work so we just stopped adding more machine-lines. There are still lines out there waiting for us to correct. For as long as I have been in the project, we haven’t accepted any pull requests we find machine-translated lines in.

When the iCBT was announced, all of us translators KNEW there would inevitably be problems. We haven’t even played the game yet either! Of course we don’t know in what context many sentences would be said in.

We all feverishly worked through the weekend prior to the iCBT to make sure everything worked, but even then we could only pull as fast as we could be sure it didn’t break the game just before the grand opening.

In fact, I personally know one of the translators was practically BEGGING imcGames to pull his pull request cause he KNEW about the sex relics problem. The problem with how the game organizes lines is that they are ALL OVER THE PLACE. It’s not organized where all lines for one quest are in one spot, they are hundreds or even thousands of lines apart. Even a professional translator imho would need time to orient themselves to how the everything works and is organized before actually working.

Please understand there are talented and hardworking people behind the scenes, and not assume we’re all just lazy butts who profit off of machine-translations. Granted, some of us honestly do find really funny machine-translated lines while working -> it provides us some entertainment while we work for free.

[ttgmichael]

LOL, I was the one who patched up those lines xD as seen here:

ETC.tsv: Fix naughty relics; Lines 2283 to 2474

Issue: Request for IMC to change these lines directly

I pressured IMC to change those lines days before the CBT. BUT during that time, there were suddenly a huge influx of “new” contributors that caused a ton of “contributions” on Github ( I guess some of them did so because they thought they could still contribute and get beta keys). So IMC wasn’t able to patch those lines into the scripts used in the CBT. In regards to what the OP said, the flood of new contributors never dragged down the quality of the translation because IMC does check the lines before they are pushed into the game, but it did SLOW the process down because “contributions” get queued up.

Still, what IMC did was CORRECT. Many lines require context from the game in order to be translated correctly and NONE of the translators at the time had played the game at all. Would you rather the translators be left in the dark before and after iCBT? o-o

I’ll assure you that most contributors at Github are like you; we want the game to be great as much as you do. We spent weeks of our summer to translate ToS, and some of us have daytime work as well. Like what FxFighter said, it’s because of these contributors making these progress that you even HAVE a iCBT to play with.

[luongvc_contact]

Unfortunately that’s how most game engine is design. The game engine uses text string id to load the string, while saved strings are stored in the order of when it was created.

iugh, forgot I should use my chrome browser to post, since I have two separate facebook accounts

[Agranite]

Ah, now I’m on the right account. Anyway, both TLC and MLT takes time and effort to do, and MTL can be as good quality but not as accurate as TLC. TLC often refer MTL as to Fanfic translations ^^;

[detrimentoeterno]

There isn’t quality check…

[Agranite]

Too bad they didn’t give us a player debug version of the client. This way we can see the id of the text, and other valuable data.

Well we just have to hang in there and wait for the in-game text editor to be implemented. It would also be nice to be able to toggle the text from local version and original korean version so that the player can check if the translation is accurate. It’s hard to verify without knowing the original text.

[FxFighter]

They already have the real-time translation feature which opens the text file at the correct line number, editing that text file updates the UI in real time. I was using it all last beta.

It would be nice if there was a more convenient way to check the original text from the game but it’s already easy enough anyway, open the same name kor file and search for the line identifier.

[HSGHHH]

I’m relatively new to the translation project and have only submitted a handful of small edits for the GitHub, and even I would agree that translators shouldn’t be rewarded with beta keys.

If IMC wish to show appreciation, they could do it in another way, like a forum badge. Giving beta keys just attracts the wrong sort of crowd for this and is totally unnecessary.

The effectiveness of a community translation is questionable, but I think the idea itself is both ingenious and generous. We’re allowed to play the game earlier through our own effort. Whether or not that can carry us to release or even past it is difficult to say, but I agree that it would not be ideal to sit on an unreliable form of translation forever.

@AmenoMiragu Explained the situation pretty well. Most of the negativity towards the recent turn of events is misplaced, but not entirely unfounded. You can still find people trying to submit machine-translated lines, like this gentleman right here:

Update QUEST_LV_0100.tsv

Of course, you also get people trying to submit just single line edits, and that’s no good. It wouldn’t be far-fetched to assume that some of these people are just here for the potential beta key reward.

I plan to start up and help in the same way I’ve been doing so once the GitHub is off lockdown, but until then…

[Masamune]

Personally, I prefer my relics a bit sexual.

[atilla11]

Well they kinda “deserve” it, maybe deserve is a bit strong but they don’t want to hire translators, fine, but they shouldn’t expect true translators to help them for free. Translating is a job, but anyone can pretend to translate through translators, but it just ends up with shitty translations, at some point. It’s not just about translating the word “die” to “mourir” to “morir”, there is a context, an history behind the words for each languages. So yeah, shitty translations is okay is they don’t hire people who actually do that as a job.

[jellyroll]