The EVE community has throughout the years proven to be one of the most dedicated gaming communities on the planet.
They’ve built hundreds of 3rd party tools, designed websites, made their own EVE gear for fanfest and even made a whole range of corny EVE songs.
Fair to say, there is no shortage of talent and commitment in the community.
So why not make use of this talent more?
When the Korean translation was announced this week it got me thinking. It took CCP more than half a year to get this done and there are over 100 other languages left to translate. So, should we wait 50+ years to get the others done or should we crowdsource that to the community?
There is no doubt in my mind that if the translation job was crowdsourced to the EVE community CCP would have nearly ALL the worlds languages done by the end of 2020 for FREE.
That is how dedicated the EVE community is!
This sourcing would, of course, require some preparation but this preparation would only have to be done ONCE for all languages. There are proven models to make this run smoothly. One could be the Wikipedia model where proven translators earn “karma” so that they get more access and their written pieces are harder to change. Another could be a simple upvote model or a mixture between the two.
Do you have other ideas of what could be crowdsourced?
I like this idea in spirit, if not in practice. I feel like there would probably be enough bad actors to ruin the project just for the sake of ruining the project.
In questionable quality. Just because someone knows something about a matter does not mean that person can translate it from one language to another.
You underestimate the amount of words in EVE, too. It is in the millions and that requires many months of work from a lot of people. The most important languages by player count are already translated. Other languages have a lot fewer people playing EVE and thus a lot fewer people who could potentially work on a translation. And that even professional translations can be wonky has been proven a couple of times with the Russian translation and the continued appearance of “fixed some typos” lines in the patch notes.
Furthermore, translators are paid workers. Working for FREE in a professional profession is inappropriate. The community not only pays CCP already for the service they also already give CCP FREE information and critique on their developments. Giving that company more FREE things is not justifiable, especially with recent development quality.
The problem: translation of new content has to be done before that content is released, obviously. Giving players access to new content’s text lines ahead of time might give advantage to them over other players.
So according to your claim it is illegal (against US law where they are registered as a company) what they do but nobody notices and/or bothers when Valve was founded in '96 and was a multi-billion dollar company already back in 2012 and grown rapidly ever since and their Steam platform that operates since 2003 and by January 2018 had a peak online user count of 18.5 million with over 47 million daily active users and by April 2019 had over a billion registered accounts, yet somehow nobody notices nor cares they according to your claim illegally utilize volunteers when they could easily afford to pay people for those specific jobs / tasks they perform? Right. If it was illegal by now they would face issues. Though as I wrote if it is actually illegal maybe they should be notified.
So a high profile company can get away with it and nobody ever recognized the fact the past decades while they literally make billions of USD? Not a single person of authority ever pursues action agaists them nor even just a random guy from the press brought this thing to light? Is that what you are saying?
Someone really should notify them or the authorities to save the children volunteers from this illegal exploitation.
It’s a fair point. Although, I don’t believe that most eve players have bad intentions but in any given group of people, there will always be a minority who want to ruin things.
This is why you have to create a Wikipedia type system for projects like this so that new users can’t just go in ruin stuff. Even if they did go in and troll a translation, the majority would downvote it so quickly that it wouldn’t survive. It would be reset to whatever were there before. This would also be more secure than Wikipedia because the eve translation project wouldn’t be in-game until the project was finished.
I agree, there would be questionable quality on some translations. That’s why you always set up a Wikipedia type system for these types of projects so that good translators rise to the top and get more “karma” and bad/new translators get restricted access until they have proven to be good.
I have done some translation work from English to Swedish and millions is actually not a lot when you consider the number of players that CCP could potentially recruit for this.
I could translate between 15-20.000 words per day when I was working full time.
So, if they set up a system where you get an In-game reward for doing the translations just like you got with Project Discovery I would gladly give them an hour every other day to produce 1000-2000 words.
So, get 50-100 people to do that and you’ll, for example, have the Spanish translation in no-time =)
True, they would have to research the legal aspects of it but I think there should be a way around that. Could be that you could say that all these people work as an intern for a limited time. Which in many countries is a legal way of hiring people for free.
Even if it turned out that they had to pay it would still be much cheaper than hiring a professional translator in per word payment. In my experience, translators on Fiverr and Upwork are usually 1/50 of the cost of a professional one. Sure, you will get a varied quality. Some will be excellent and some will be bad but if you can sort out the bad translations in a system you would, in the end, have a good product.
It’s not about “getting away” with anything or exploiting people. It’s about people having such a love for the game that they are willing to give CCP their free time to make the game better faster It’s their choice to make.
My point is that we’ve seen thousands of people in the EVE community that has built 3rd party applications for the game for free just because they love the game and want to improve the experience.
Translating EVE would be on the exact same level as that.
I think you replied to the wrong person of that specific convo as I am not the one who labeled it as illegal and also not the one who called it wrong either.
There’s a whole range of problems with it. Even if you set up a Wikipedia like system, it’s still open for utterly ridiculous translations. If 10 people uses the same grammatical errors and 3 uses the correct, those 3 needs to prove they’re correct. But, who is going to be the judge of that? You’d still need to hire some translators to oversee the total project. Those 10 people could potentially destroy the translations all together, even with the best of intention, if you doesn’t have any translators as project leaders.
Crowd sourcing usually only matters where there’s no, or an extremely tight budget, and where the quality is less important than the outcome. It’s rarely any good for established companies with a budget.
I’m Danish, and I can see the potential and absolute shitty translations that’s commonplace. I’d rather play the game in English, than having to deal with poorly translations ruining my gaming experience. My English isn’t perfect, and I’m painfully aware of this. But, I’ve seen absolute crap translations from people claiming to be translators.
