[2022] Community Council

Just wanted to pop in and acknowledge this thread although I haven’t had time to read it all yet, I will bookmark it so I can go through it in the next week or 2.

Currently we’re sort of looking at this area again - communication and transparency.

We’re reviewing the beta program again, in more depth this time, maybe ideas around better communication or an idea of a “council” could be integrated some way into the beta program. I will read up on this thread over the next week or 2 to see if there’s anything we could integrate. We’ll also be looking at how other games do it well and what we can do to emulate that within our scope.

For now, I just got back to work today after having the flu all week and other team members have been out sick as well so next week will mostly be catch up work then we can get into it more.

The community is great at sharing how you feel and what the top issues and feedback are.

It’s the team’s job to try to reduce how often issues happen, there’s nothing you folks can do to help us with this, that’s on us.

Regarding translations, it’s an ethical problem and possibly a legal one here in Australia where volunteers can’t/shouldn’t be doing the job of paid employees and translation is a paid job. Otherwise, we’re completely grateful at how generous our community are with offering their time to translate the game for us - we’re just not in a position to take you up on it.

I always pull this story out whenever translation issues come up. The last company I worked at supported 42 languages/dialects. There was 1 Translator and 1-2 proof readers per language. All translations were from German or English, so we had a minimum of 80 people reading the English text PLUS the developers who wrote the text and there were STILL spelling mistakes and slip ups.

I think it has a lot to do with the fact that humans don’t read every letter of every word, we read in chunks, so your brain basically recognises the word based on the first couple of letters, the last letter or 2 and the shape of the word and basically it fills in the gaps for you unless you’re really sitting there analysing every letter - which you just won’t do over thousands of words because your brain gets fatigued by it and starts subconsciously working out short cuts like the aforementioned things.

Spell checkers are great but won’t pick up grammatical issues, or issues if the typo makes another real word - so there’s definitely tools and methods to try to ensure the text is as good as possible (some of my favourite are a simple spell checker, grammarly and yoast). However, based on this experience I’ve had I’m convinced that no matter what you do there will always be mistakes in any kind of text no matter what you do. We’ve had community members submit corrected text with mistakes in the corrections. It’s really not as easy as it seems. It doesn’t excuse the mistakes and my story might sound extreme but there it is haha

All of our translators are native speakers, play Gems of War, have access to update info before it’s released so they have additional context to what they’re translating, and at least one of them is a professional translator as their day job outside of just Gems of War.

We prefer to have people who play Gems of War so they understand the context of what they’re translating.

I’m not denying there’s problems with the text and I’m certainly not accusing anyone of lying. I’m just saying in a round about way that it doesn’t matter who translates it there will be mistakes because humans aren’t perfect, even with spell checkers and grammarly.

The best process is for CX to report issues with the text when they appear and that feedback to be passed onto the translators to be fixed. Then the whole thing is all of us learn from our mistakes right? Better to have someone experienced who makes mistakes and learns from them than to hire someone new who hasn’t made any mistakes yet and start the process from scratch. I’d also point out that it’s not a one person issue, I don’t feel it’s constructive to call out single people and blame them for it. It’s inaccurate to blame people without knowing who wrote the mistake into the text and also pointing fingers doesn’t actually solve the problem at all.

I will raise the translation issues with the team again to try to get more attention on them.

I think we should try not to derail this thread any further though. I’m happy to continue the discussion in a translation specific thread, but just a disclaimer, try not to criticise people in your posts. If it gets personal it will be against the community guidelines. Always happy to take feedback about game things though.