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Steam Translation Community Slaving Away

Posted by timothy on from the in-their-air-conditioned-galleys dept.

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."

3 of 214 comments (clear)

  1. I sense a disterbance is the force by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    It's like a hundred million lawyers just cackled with insane glee!

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AOL_Community_Leader_Program

  2. Re:And? by hedwards · · Score: 4, Informative

    You mean apart from the fact that this is almost certain to be a violation of the FLSA? http://www.dol.gov/elaws/esa/flsa/docs/volunteers.asp for more information.

    The shortened version is that you can't accept volunteer labor unless you're a religious institution, a charitable organization or are public sector or are a similar type of non-profit entity. Valve definitely can't accept volunteer labor if its going to be profiting from it.

  3. Re:And? by murdocj · · Score: 4, Informative

    The FLSA says that EMPLOYEES can't volunteer their time. In other words, I work for company X, I can't then "volunteer" an extra few hours to the company. Could someone please point to the point of the FLSA that refers to non-employees of Valve?