Slashdot Mirror
Steam Translation Community Slaving Away
An anonymous reader writes "Steam has decided to build a community effort to get its Steam platform and game files translated by the community, but here is the catch: Translators do not get paid. Millions could be saved by Steam by making the community work for free. The article describes basic estimates on how much is saved by Steam in translation costs."
That slashdot, which touts "free" as in "beer" software and Linux at every opportunity, has posted an incredulous article about Valve crowd-sourcing work for nothing.
Or people in some country are going to be wondering why everyone keeps telling Gordon Freeman that their hovercraft is full of eels.
and you are bilingual wouldn't you want for your non bilingual Korean (or whatever) speaking buddy to be able to play the same games as you? I would think that contributors should at least get free games though.
It's like a hundred million lawyers just cackled with insane glee!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AOL_Community_Leader_Program
For the most part, this isn't that unusual. See, for instance, the "Google in your Language" project.
And it's not like the users are being scammed or anything. They weren't promised money or anything, and they're getting... exactly what they signed up for. I won't be surprised if Valve does, eventually, start giving them a few gifts, but I also don't think it's unethical. This would be like complaining that /. story submitters don't get paid for contributing content - after all, Slashdot makes several bajillion dollars every nanosecond, but it would be NOTHING without such insightful and well-researched articles provided graciously by the readers.
This is also the only way to get some translations done. Sure, finding a translator for Spanish or even two types of Chinese may be easy, but what about Bulgarian? Or Thai? Or "Pirate"? Yes, there's poor, suffering, unpaid people slaving away at "translating" games into a fake dialect.
Translators have to work insane hours, to meet insane deadlines. They are paid insanely small amounts of money and have to wait insanely long to get their well deserved money.
http://nopeanuts.wordpress.com/
Steam does give free games away, I got Portal for free when they offered it for free for everyone.
_ _ _ Go for the eyes Boo! GO FOR THE EYES!
Wake me up when they pay somebody to translate it to work on Linux or at the very least release Half-Life 2 episode 3.
Its nothing new for people to contribute to translations of software they like in the open source community. You don't get anything in return, except for the feeling that your contributions will be appreciated by others who speak your language, and you get to enjoy your favorite applications in your native language.
What's the big deal if Valve is allowing the same for their games? For those who speak a lesser known language, this could be a godsend. Translations may never have been considered for their language if Valve went and had professional translations done.
The article does have a valid point, that Valve saves a big chunk of change not paying for translations. However, in another light, the author sounds butt-hurt that anyone would consider contributing to something they enjoy.
I thought crowdsourcing was the way of the future, what have I missed?
The "article" assumes Valve would otherwise pay to have the translations done.
This is a questionable assumption. The alternative assumption is that these translations would be uneconomic to do professionally therefore they have allowed the community to do translations instead of not having it at all. The latter assumption seems more probable given we're talking about the back catalogue.
It's difficult to judge since the "article" has no citations, not even a link for the quote cited "Steam forums". There's no basic information such as the languages being translated.
And... Oh forget it. The "article" isn't even of a standard worthy of criticising.
Honestly, what's wrong with that guy? VALVe has a community of dedicated fans who want to translate content for everyone and their friend to enjoy. This is the same idea as Wikipedia, OpenStreetmaps, and things like that.
And he complains because VALVe doesn't give away millions of dollars in return? What the fuck man? They're doing this on purpose, because they like VALVe, and they certainly don't care about not getting paid, shown by the quote in TFA.
Author is a giant fuckhead, probably jealous and he hasn't had the idea first.
I can't wait for bases all of the enemy are belonging to the not enemy but not to us sire.
Please have orders for the doing to counter the productiveness of their assault upon the bases that are not theirs but not ours either?
From the article:
Translators do not get paid. They do enjoy many perks however, like access to the game text to be translated (not the game itself, god forbid they could actually test their translation within the game and not have to pay for it), and⦠and⦠thatâ(TM)s about it.
Reminds me of something somebody rich and famous once said (no, it was NOT Steve Jobs):
There are two hundred million idiots, manipulated by a million intelligent men.
- Pablo Escobar (Ref: https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Pablo_Escobar)
I hate to be the bearer of good news, but free translation is often the only way you get an official translation without having to pirate and hack the game yourself.
Let's re-frame the situation. The game is released in English, thus is only available to English users and those foreigners who know English, this leaves out a few billion people doesn't it? The Chinese for one will openly pirate a game and localize a game if you don't, so that's one reason, So will Russians. The flipside is also true, Americans will pirate Asian games and translate them, because the developers don't want to spend time localizing them.
So everyone wins if they do free translation, you get native language version of the game, the game developer gets translations that they otherwise wouldn't bother with. The translation teams get to put their skills to good use (most of the fansubbing community for Anime practices their skills this way.) And pirates can no longer use the "they don't sell it here" excuse.
I'd actually like to see this crowdsourcing taken up with anime, movie and tv show subtitles as well as comic book/manga translation, as in officially released translations. It would seriously put a dent in the piracy, making it much easier to identify criminal piracy.
"Millions could be saved by Steam by making the community work for free."
So when open source crowdsources development it's great, but when video game companies do it it's exploitative? And how exactly are volunteers "forced" to do anything?
If the costs of professional translation are as high as the article suggests (nearly $1 million just to translate Steam storefront pages), then this move makes sense to me. How many sales are you going to gain by having 26 different translations of a game? How many people who might use a translation wouldn't have just played the game in English in the absence of one? Even Valve's AAA titles from before this weren't in 26 languages. Half-Life 2 is only in 18. And that's for a big budget game. For smaller titles, the benefit from translating is undoubtedly not worth the cost.
Given that, I think this is a perfectly reasonable thing to do. Rather than fans of a game having to organize a team to translate it and hack up a patch, there is now a way for everyone to contribute as much as they like to a publisher-sponsored effort. You'd have to be pretty damn cynical to see this as a bad thing.
It's a pretty smart move by valve as it saves them money and some people will participate if only for the reason to try to make a release faster or just because. That said, they really do need an incentive if they really want participation. They could make it into a points system where people get points per sentence translation where they can exchange for discounts/free stuff. This would cost valve little and greatly increase participation as many would participate especially if you put it into a more competitive game-like format.
I can see this overall being a good thing especially for translations to a language which really doesn't have a big enough market or being a small indie game to make it worth translating but where there is a large enough market hopefully steam hires professional translators
Posted by timothy...
An anonymous reader writes...
Is timothy going to split slashdot's ad revenue with anonymous?
I mod down anyone who says "I will be modded down for this", regardless of the rest of their comment
will love this.
Maybe has their children hostage? No?
So how are they "making" them do this.
Just wait until this moron finds out all the people being "made" to write linux code. Actually he has a minecraft section in his top menu, is he getting paid for that prime advertising spot? Or was he "made" to do that by the evil Mojang folk?
I manage a team of translators for a website and can tell you that community translations are shit. They'll spend more money paying people to delete abduction update bad translations than they would pay to just have good translators in the first place. They don't even have to pay .09 cents per word like the article estimates, my translators do a great job and work for .03 cents a word. Community translations on a project as big as Steam are a waste of time.
Of course we'll do it ourselves -- otherwise, Steam would have to distribute the costs to the consumers, but it's not fair to say they're saving millions because the translations will be made by amateurs. People who think Steam and other companies are cheating by crowd-sourcing are just jealous; they expect us all to pay expensive professionals to do something that amateurs can do on their own if given the chance.
Has been doing this for a while now..
Open source developers usually get jobs based upon their work. Ideally, no programmer should ever be paid more than $100k without having either (a) a degree in math, physics, or engineering instead of computer science, i.e. understanding numbers, or (b) some minor but useful open source projects for code samples. Translators never really make over $100k.
Images float through my head; the paradise of the end of scarcity, the oligarchs chanting that scarcity is what motivates the free market and so must be protected, then hiring legislators to pass laws to increase artificial scarcity, while capitalizing on the new option of non-scarcity to get free tools for advancing the market penetration of their artificially scarce goods.
It seems apparent that they would rather be kings in hell than peers in heaven.
Stop-Prism.org: Opt Out of Surveillance
As to the pernicious lie that Valve has enslaved these translators: really? Are you claiming that Valve has stuck a gun to their collective heads and told them to work or face dire consequences up to and including torture or death?
This is certainly a volunteer effort to begin with, done so that the translators themselves can enjoy the games in their native languages.
Seriously, this article is a troll. Slavery, indeed.
Hail Eris, full of mischief...
E pluribus sanguinem
Slashdot has decided to build a community effort to get its Slashdot news blog proof-read, edited and reviewed by the community, but here is the catch: commenters do not get paid. Millions could be saved by Slashdot by making the community work for free. The article describes basic estimates on how much is saved by Slashdot in editing costs.
Some of the official translations they've got so far has been abysmal, obviously being translated by someone not fluent in the language, with inexplicable grammar and mixing words of "similar looking" languages (no, Swedish, Danish, Norwegian and German are NOT interchangable), or maybe even translated automatically, so I doubt they've spent anything on translation thus far. If they did, they certainly didn't get their money's worth. Getting people who actually speak the languages to contribute can only be an improvement.
Languages like spanish have a huge number of variations (it's pretty much different in every country, heck, even inside the same country), and we end up enduring a washed-up version of an international spanish that's usually awful. Crowdsourced translations at least let you correct the translation and add variations that feel better for a speakers of a certain variation of the language.
One good example of this type of crowdsourced effort is subtitles. See "subtitulos.es" for example. You can get a complete movie or series chapter translated in a few hours. From the basic result obtained there, several teams around the world further localize the language (for example to Argentinian spanish).
Give them hats.
So, what you mean is that Steam project managers are awesome at their jobs and people are stupid for signing up to do it for free?
Or are you an unemployed interpreter?
There is no punch line.
Game headlines are translated for free.. Ok. Thanks. Good to know.
"It would be understandable if Steam was a charity, however, I do not see Steam giving away their games any time soon."
TF2 F2P. Alien Swarm. Literally hundreds of great Steam sales. It's obvious whoever wrote this is not familiar with Valve or Steam at all.
Somewhere in Mexico or Spain some kid is gonna come across a game informing him "Todos son su base nos pertenece".
If I were involved I would have to sneak that in somewhere... :D
If we want to translate the pages for free to help spread fun to those who don't speak English, I don't see why third parties should give a damn.
No one is forcing anyone to translate these pages. People not involved shouldn't get their panties in a twist. You're not looking out for us. We care more about helping those who would otherwise miss a good game find them.
Sometimes people do things without expecting to be paid. There are a lot of people creating mods for games, most of them for free. They work for the fun of it, not money. It's similar to open source: you use the work of others and in return you contribute something back for free. Valve has always been very good at working with the community. Unlike other companies suing modders, they encouraged it, and in fact hired and paid people of the modding community. Accusing them of exploit is stupid.
"We are all exploiting something and someone every day"
got my fill of ideology for the day.
--
Are community translations that awful when the process consists of receiving multiple distinct translations for each entry, with the community voting on them, causing many of those that should be deleted not even being considered?
If each line requires a sufficient number of up-votes before getting preliminary approval (and even being looked at by the one person the company hired who is a fluent reader of the language) most of the crap should hopefully be filtered out.
Stylish sheet to fix many problems in Slashdot's D3: https://gist.github.com/801524
In the game industry, this is kind of par for the course. When Nintendo refused to release MOTHER 3 in America, a bunch of very smart programmers and translators reverse-engineered the game and produced a patch which translated the game into English -very well-. In fact this sort of thing happens all the time. Name any SNES RPG not released in North America or Europe and I could probably find you the fan translation patch. I'm actually doing some reverse-engineering for a translation project as we speak. It's not even legal to do and people are doing it out of their own free will. If anything I'm hoping this leads towards a greater legitimacy towards fan translations. Sure, yes, there's a value in hiring professional translators when it makes economic sense, but fans can and should be allowed to fill in the gaps.
Speaking as someone who speaks a second language, is academically certified in that language and makes his living off of translating and teaching that language,
I'm fine with this, because it will never be as good as a professional translation. It doesn't effect people like me.
Don't believe me? Look at anime shows that have been subtitled by its fans, or the complete lack of any translation of most literature and media that doesn't appeal to pop culture.
If nobody volunteers to translate Team Fortress 2 to Bulgarian, then how would they hope to play with their Bulgarian friends? I doubt Steam would spend the thousands of dollars to translate a game that might sell less than a hundred localized copies.
The article says the "normal rate" is 9 cents per word. Not sure what industry that's supposed to be in, but around here a high rate (for highly technical translation, such as for industrial manuals) is 4 or 5 cents per word. Games and "normal" books generally pay 2 or 3 cents per word. And TV translators get paid less than 1 cent per word.
Part of the reason why most translations are so bad is that the publishers never bother to check the quality of those translations, all they look for is the cheapest translation possible, and the world is full of people who think they can "espick Inglesh" (or "parlay Frunsay", etc.) and who will gladly undercut each other for the chance to murder the original text / game / TV show / etc.. Ultimately, readers who understand the original language will just read the original, and the other ones will never know how bad the translation is. A lot of great authors are essentially ignored in some markets simply because the translation of their work is so bad.
Welcome to the nineteenth century ! Next up: electricity.
Oh so it's about some game company never mind.
Religion is what happens when nature strikes and groupthink goes wrong.
How many languages will be supported on Linux?
Open source development is open source-- everyone benefits.
If you don't think translating a game benefits you then don't translate it... I think this is great, that Valve builds a community of people dedicated to improved the gaming experience, just for fun.
Who knows maybe this community could in the long run get other/more responsibilities, build levels and mods, the more involved users are the better, both for the users and the publisher. I mean if the community grows strong, maybe it'll complain about DRM, lack of linux support or unfair user agreements. Who knows?
Slashdot is a commercial entity and it profits from user submitted content for which it does not pay, user comments for which it does not pay AND has its moderation done by users, who, you guess it, it doesn't pay.
Pot calling kettle!
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Take a good look at these graphs
It's only pirates and Greeks who know the true value of manual labor :)
I thought this was being translated, as in ported, to other platforms.
Like Linux.
Crap. I'm never going to get to play Portal 2 on my Fedora laptop, am I?
Darryl L. Pierce "What do you care what people think, Mr. Feynman?"
And quite a selfish opinion at that. I bet he's the sort of person who is mortified at the thought of giving anything away for free; and yet sitting right there on that same page of navel-gazing, hypocritically, is a big yellow PayPal donate button.
A large segment of the community clamors about wanting to play games that are not properly localized or translated. A select few in this community rise above the occasion and actually make the translation. Historically, these translations are released gratis as patches that must be downloaded separately from the game. To this day, there are (too many to count) forum threads where people are constantly asking "where can I find a translation" or "why doesn't someone release the game/rom with the translated files in them?"
It seems that Valve is listening to the community and enabling easier access to community translations. And its not like it is paying translators any less than before. In fact, since the only significant past payment has come through recognition, if Valve can get more people to play the games then the translators should get more recognition.
So how is this exploitative or against the community's interest?
I do not see the sense in translating closed source games for free. The translation is usable only by the game company, most likely there is a clause somewhere stating the translator loses all rights to his/her work after submitting the translation to the game company.
Surely there are umpteen open source applications needing translation to any language. There the translation also becomes "free", so it can be used in other similar appliations or in other contexts.
A community duped into helping a DMA company profit? Sigh.
I partook in the first community translation project Steam ran, back in 2007. This was a small-scale project, wherein the support pages were turned into a wiki and got translated into a couple of major languages (about 10 I suppose) by a small team of volunteers.
We were paid, in a way, however. Everyone got the the Valve Holiday 2006 Pack containing all Valve Source games and later on got a very good quality T-shirt with the Steam logo and the text "Steam Support Wiki Translator." Who says this won't happen again?
You are a massive cunt, writer. Seriously. People put effort into their translations, and all you can come up with is a "valve rips them off lol valve sucks". What are you, a fucking Origin fanboy?
Valve have spent countless time and money nurturing the Steam Community. Running forums, making changes based on the community, creating events, keeping the griefers under control; all of this requires funding. Given how much been put in to build such a strong community, they have really earnt this level of support form their community (which is obvious through the positive response by their community). Good work!
Think again. Can you really live off 3 Cents per word (I assume that you don't really mean 0.03 Cents) and support yourself or even a family? Also, to quote a post from above:
Translators have to work insane hours, to meet insane deadlines. They are paid insanely small amounts of money and have to wait insanely long to get their well deserved money.