berenim: Hi everyone,
at last I have time for WL2 DC. Started playing it in the German version and sometimes I wondered about translations, missing translations, missing formatting (rather formatting being printed on the screen) and straight inconsistencies in the translation, where they jump between the right translation and a literal (in the German case wrong) translation. Example for the last one: In German we say "Zwei Fliegen mit einer Klappe schalgen", roughly translated with "Kill two flies with one fly swatter", equivalent to "Kill two birds with one stone".
In one dialog in the AG center it is "Zwei Vögel" (two birds) in the dialog, the button says "two flies" and the question preview again says "two birds".
Are all translations that crazy? I doubt it will be much use to collect those cases now.
Well, Wasteland 2 translation was not a professional one but instead make use a special crowfunding system with the fans. I still have a copy of the e-mail at that time;
And we always planned to involve our fans, so we've launched our Wasteland 2 localization crowdsourcing effort. We are counting on our fans to join our Get Localization project for French, Italian, German and Spanish and together do the bulk of the work on translating to those languages. When that step is complete we will hand the results to professional editors who will do editing and consistency passes. This is an important step to ensure that the localized version will meet the high, professional standards we are looking for.
The more fans we get involved and the more they translate, the faster and better our localized versions will be. We sincerely hope this'll be a fun and productive process. At the end of it, we'll be looking at ways to help compensate via upgrades or cash for the backers that helped generate the most translations.
I personally never tried other than english (due BAD experiences from the past) but AFAIK this was not the fiasco that Torment: Tides of Numenera was (even when this one was done by a professional studio)
uh, I think this second mail about the translation advance will be funny for you:
Crowdsourcing Localization – Next Steps
We launched the Wasteland 2 crowdsourcing localization about a week ago. The effort is off to a very good start, with the hyper-efficient Germans leading the way. We invited a few of our editors to take an early look at the translation output of our fans and they were well impressed by the quality and consistency of our crowdsourced translations. That's the value of getting real RPG Gamers involved! From here on out our editors will start becoming more active on Get Localization itself, guiding and interacting with our community.
The more volunteers we have, the higher the quality of the translations. We spoke earlier on rewarding our fans, and the top translators will get selected rewards later, but to reward our productive translators, we've decided to give everyone who provides approved translation of over 250 strings a digital copy of Wasteland 2, which will include beta access (please do provide your email address when registering, as otherwise we have no way to contact you).
For new fans or fans who backed at a lower tier, this will allow you to jump into the beta. For other backers, here's an extra copy to give to a friend! Plus it helps everyone to ensure our translators have access to the beta, as this'll give them more context and understanding of strings they're translating.
Please note your strings do have to be reviewed and approved before you get your Steam key for Wasteland 2, not just by us but also by our existing Get Localization community.
