Localizing Papers, Please
dukope.tumblr.com
dukope.tumblr.com
http://paperspleaseloc.github.io/
Pretty brilliant...reading Pope's devlog for the game makes it clear that he's an excellent game developer and designer..but it's unexpected that he'd also know how to whip up a useful, well-designed web-app for the purposes of supporting his game like this.
FWIW, playing Papers Please, you can easily come to the same conclusion. The game is a great game.
Contrast this with getting high scores, competing with your friends, collecting pickups, etc. that are all what I would call traditional game mechanics.
Then again, even Papers Please is making common mistakes. I can count on a single finger the number of i18n jobs I have seen. One in many years of looking at IT jobs. This stuff is little understood, and very little demand. But he makes of pointing out how this will causes problems.
I would love to see this game in Arabic, for example. Number in Arabic is crazy complicated, and as a guy who translated software for FOSS (arabeyes.org) there is a reason I bring up the number logic (1, dual, 3-99, 1000+ dictate different noun classes) and POT handles that. This and many other issues indicate why no one can be bothered to handle this until much later, and then it is such a pain in the ass with non-English charsets.
Not that this issue has come up a lot on HN recently. I am glad people are showing this stuff with interest. Regardless of my opinion, this is very cool work and I am glad to see developers caring again.
That's without getting into licensing headaches, which is why the idea of P/Invoking GNU gettext is a straight-up nopenopenope.
CSV is common because there are many more applications that can read/write it, it's relatively standard, and translation data tends to be vaguely relational.
Ideally, users should be cautious in choosing the projects to which their dedicate their interest and enthusiasm (choose those which belong to the community)... Under the assumption that the game cannot be made open source (or that it is impractical to give a share of the game's profit to the contributing users), I imagine that a good solution would be to republish all translations separately under an open license (in case they can be reused, very theoretically, for something else... maybe as an aligned corpus to train a machine translation system), and make sure that the users who contributed are prominently credited.
They also just released a really neat Javascript tool which makes translating web content super easy. You just embed some JS in your template, and it re-writes the pages in translation when needed. Way way easier than, for example, setting up a multilingual Drupal site, and in most cases, will get the job done nicely.
My $0.02
Why do people feel the need to write this after their posts? Were you afraid it would not be clear that it was an opinion? What purpose does it serve? Why did you go to such length to write it as "My $0.02" rather than "My two cents", or just "My 2c"?
It seems to be some kind of "thing" that people do here. Is it an in-joke?
I just don't get it - is it supposed to be a joke?
the user of the phrase hopes to lessen the impact of a
possibly contentious statement, showing politeness and
humility.And the US is about the only country in the world where MDY order for date parts is used exclusively. I wouldn't call the US and Belize »many countries« ;-)
> There’s a system for making people sound generally non-Japanese (using lots of katakana and dropping prepositions), but it’s tiring to read and has an air of childishness, since this is one of the first scripts kids learn to read/write in Japan
This is utterly wrong. Katakana usage in Japanese has nothing childish attached to it. If at all, Hiragana would be the one which is considered the more "childish" way of writing, but there are numerous imported words (and more and more, I'd say) using Katakana even in business context - and certainly taken very seriously.
If you don't know a language, don't make assumptions on it. By the way the french translation of "Your son is dead" as "Votre fils est mort" is very dry and tasteless, the proper way or saying it in french is "votre fils est decede". I hate it when people do a literate translation from English to French, many words are similar but they are not used at all in the same situations.
mort = dead
You don't have to hate
In translations you'll often get situations where A should be translated to B' in that context (even if in the original language B wouldn't be used there), in order to transfer the concept properly. Literal translations often end up weird, and sometimes completely wrong.
Yes, this is why most people generally hate doing translations in general - people like you who nitpick.
It's not nitpicking, if there are 50 000+ words in the common language there's a reason for it.
I don't know a bit of French, or Japanese. But I do know that there are a awful lot of English translations, done by well-meaning people, which vary from mediocre to Godawful. Almost every anime subtitling job I've ever seen is at the very least somewhat stilted and awkward to my ear. (Though they're still better than the dubs.) And a lot of it comes down to native English speakers who fear losing the intended nuances of the original and so do a rigidly literal translation, because they think that's the "most accurate."
So the problem isn't nitpicking; it's the wrong kind of nitpicking. If you think you can do a translation by following a rulebook and wave off dissenters as "nitpickers," you are probably going to do a shitty job, and have no idea why.
Agree with you.
One of the key issues is that, to be a good translator you need to have a good command of BOTH languages. I can tell you I see piss poor French translations (from English or other languages) every day as well, and it's not nitpicking, it's just people doing an awful job at what they are being paid for. Most people who do translations are barely even literate in their own language in the first place (you can see that in their obvious lack of vocabulary).
On the other hand, I'd say the best translations I have seen go way beyond the original work, making the translated work even better, more rich, more nuanced than what it was before. It's not just "translation", it's rather close to versioning.
Maddeningly, whenever that happens with e.g. anime you immediately get swarms of furious fans decrying the translation for "inaccuracy."
That's exactly the point. You wouldn't really say it like this in English either, but in a Soviet style totalitarian state, it's easy to see.
(speaking as a native English speaker, that has lived / worked in Paris for the last ten years)
that's different words in English.
similarly there's other languages that would translate the English words "(of) death" and "death (of)" to different words (because of case).
and you don't say "Certificate of the Dead", which is yet another phrase with a different meaning and nearly the same words.
it's just different!
The tone "dead" confers is much colder than deceased, which is exactly why the author chose to use it. To show the state couldn't care less.