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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.
It's like a hundred million lawyers just cackled with insane glee!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AOL_Community_Leader_Program
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.
Nobody is forcing them to do it for fucks sake!
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.
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.
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?