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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."
Or people in some country are going to be wondering why everyone keeps telling Gordon Freeman that their hovercraft is full of eels.
Worse than that - according to the summary/article it's "slavery" and Valve "make" them do it.
Not like these people volunteer and do it on their own time or anything... no, Steam "knows" they are foreign and won't let them play their games until they've translated enough...
It's like saying that Counterstrike "makes" people set up servers for it, or that Minecraft "makes" you create works of art.
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.
Open source is Free. You pay nothing for it.
Steam is literally an advertising platform used to shove corporate DRM-ware down your throat. Hell, Steam itself IS DRM.
You may not have to pay anything to get Steam itself - but what you're installing is a DRM and advertising platform.
Compare with something useful like a web browser or a complete operating system. Yeah, I'd say the two are slightly different.
Will the translators free work be freely available? If so, then this is great. If not, then there are problems.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
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.
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.
Will the translators free work be freely available? If so, then this is great. If not, then there are problems.
Indeed. Because Steam exercises considerable direction and control over their translators, they might be considered employees. AOL ran into minimum wage laws when they had forum moderators. Eventually, they had to pay them back pay.
It looks like they're about 75% done translating.
"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.
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?
Participating in free software like Linux and this are very different things.
Only by participating in free software do you realize its full potential; by translating text for free for a closed company you get no benefit at all.
Different, sure. "Very" different, no.
Let's assume that Valve isn't willing to fork out the money to translate their platform to those other languages. As the article estimates, it's expensive (and I agree it's expensive... a company I worked for paid about 26k per translation of the software they developed internally, and some languages are much more expensive than others, and those are usually the ones that have fewer users). So that'd make some sense, since their market may not be as large in those areas - more so, their market of people that can't read English in those areas may not justify the cost and effort to create and maintain the translations themselves.
However, if there's still some market there, why not let that market justify itself... they provide the translation, and they get to reap the benefits (able to use Steam and view some games in their native tongue). That sure does sound like a nice benefit to me.
I am a free software proponent, and I would agree that it would be more beneficial to society if Steam itself was an open source platform. But that's not required to make this still be a good thing.
Nobody is forcing them to do it for fucks sake!
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.
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But it's just so outrageous. How dare those people be allowed to translate those things?
They're not being paid in cash. They just enjoy it! Unbelievable!
Someone should stop Valve before it's too late.
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.
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).
It isn't a straw man because the parent said "his objection is to doing work for free", as if somehow they were being coerced into doing it. Well, they aren't. So apart from demonstrating yourself to be a patronising, sanctimonious arse who doesn't know what a straw-man argument is, your comment here has achieved absolutely nothing.
The difference is that it's OK to volunteer for a non-profit or charitable organization, but illegal when it's a for profit entity that's profiting from the labor. The reason being that it makes it harder for companies to pressure employees to work off the clock so that they don't get laid off in the future.
http://www.dol.gov/elaws/esa/flsa/docs/volunteers.asp
Nobody is forcing them to do it for fucks sake!
No, but it is an asymmetric relationship which is shifting wealth (in the economic sense; the ability to satisfy wants, not cash) from one group of people to another. Such asymmetry is ever worthy of consideration, at least for anyone who loves the free market. The free market would be most efficient if all transactions were perfectly symmetric. Any who believe that there is value in maximizing GDP would do well to always contemplate asymmetric transactions, and ponder if there is a way to influence the market to more closely approximate symmetry.
Any who believes asymmetry is a good thing is an enemy of the free market; a thief and a brigand.
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Any who believes asymmetry is a good thing is an enemy of the free market; a thief and a brigand.
How efficient is a market where people want to play a game but can't for lack of a translation? Voluntary, self-interested transactions are the foundation of a free market; it has fuck all to do with "symmetry."
DATABASE WOW WOW
Red Hat makes money primarily on support and if you don't want to pay them, then you have other options, you can go without support or you can hire somebody else. With Steam, you pay for the product and support or you do without, the other option being piracy.
I'd say that makes it very different, when a corporation uses volunteer labor for a pay only product, that's fundamentally different from when a corporation makes money off a freely available product.
I know people like Steam and all but it's not the only legal option. If you don't like Steam you don't use it, games can still be purchased through other channels, but if someone does like Steam enough to go above and beyond giving them their money what's wrong with that?
On the other end of the equation, what's wrong with a corporation using volunteers? If they have people lining up to work for free on a project they can make some money off why wouldn't they let them? All they offered was a fuzzy feeling and people still lined up. This seems like a case of everyone getting what they want.
They say a little knowledge is a dangerous thing, but it's not one half so bad as a lot of ignorance. - Terry Pratchett
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.
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.
You're really damn close to arguing the same way union labor does.
I have the right to charge whatever I want for my labor, all the way down to $0/hr. Is it fair to you if I can do the job better and don't need the money? No. Since when is a free market about fairness and not efficiency?
Free, volunteer labor is never wrong for a for-profit company. Its just wrong to those who would rather get paid while others are willing to do it for free.