Return to community-contributed translations
Con risposta
I think many former translators can agree that company-based translations have not proven to be effective over months after switching, moreover, the quality and slowness hurts the Discord localization part, your fans around the world.
The arguments you have provided to us while you were closing the program aren't really correct and it seems that you had some other motive to “escape” from community translations, maybe ever following the trends of other big companies to run away from the community.
Let us speak from our heart and nicely ask you to return to community-based translations and instead of avoiding us, work altogether, means show your support to the international community by listening to our feedback and providing small goods, such as asked profile badge. Because that will allow people that will be working for your good on globe market feel worthy and produce more qualitative results. This will also allow you to create another community of fans, like HypeSquad, but instead of going events they will be focusing on making Discord accessible for people all around a world, for people who don't know the English language.
- The NDA stuff, that was mentioned, that the company may translate things before they go public is actually not a point. Yes, secrets are okay, but when it comes to quality nobody cares about if translations were out when things released or soon after. Just update translation frequently or make it even near-live, as Telegram messenger did, but not sure if that possible with Crowdin.
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This and the following bullet were edited per Manfre suggestions in comments that I personally agree with:
The company and the translation community should work separately. Company should be translating legal stuff (Privacy Policy, Terms of Service, Developer Terms of Service) and important strings (if there any).
- There are other places where the translation community could not get into it because we weren't allowed to (e.g. Discord Support, Developer Documentation, Change Logs) these should be either translated by the community (proofreaders) or either we should have ways to report incorrect translations and possible improvements for the company's translation. Reports must have effective response too, not being “acknowledged” and stuck without any action for eternity.
• The developer documentation could be translated in the same GitHub repository where you are hosting your documentation: https://github.com/discordapp/discord-api-docs. The question is only the structure that is comfortable for both you and the community. Git should be known to developers, but improved CONTRIBUTING.md welcomed.
- When I said that you may listen to the community, there are few things, that we, as translators frequently asked for:
• Upload large strings (such as e-mails, pages) as separate text files, so we able to translate the sentence for sentence instead of the whole document. That is easy to proofread and translate. If you are not able to do it on Crowdin, use public GitHub repository instead and accept Pull Requests.
• Make and upload subtitles for video, so we able to make “Don't be a broom” videos accessible and maybe Ivan Popkov perestanet ispolzovat venik (excuse my Russian here)
• Use fonts that support all other languages, for example, Cyrillic is supported in Whitney font, but is not supported on any of the Discord sites, besides the client
• Provide context, make an official translators server, where people can ask a question and get answers. Most of the time we were searching for context on our own and rarely questions in the comments were read
• When it comes to change logs, allow a group of people selected by proofreaders, that will be checking change logs translation quality for their language or even translate on their own
- You have said that we can report things so they can get fixed, and as Russian proofreader that got more exclusive way to report all mistakes, I allowed our former community to report mistakes with me, but apparently, nobody cares about that being done this way.
Asking some users, they don't feel any effort by reporting mistakes. The same as they have given up over (really sorry) s--tty translations of articles on Support Site and Changelogs. Also, the question still remains: how are users supposed know where they can report absolutely gross translations, without knowing of heaven called “Discord translators” or having fellow DMP friend.
Previously they could go and apply on Crowdin by the link in settings and even that they did not get accepted most of the time in the team, because they did not read the project description that includes text they should pass in reason of applying, they were able to report mistake to proofreader, who nicely DM'ed them reason being denied to join the team.
So it would be awesome if you could not only return to community-based translations but allow basic users to report translation mistakes and localization team members to see and resolve them.
That could be a GitHub repository as I had, with the special form that calls GitHub API and creates an issue with the bot, so users don't need an additional account on a random site.
Or you could just make a Google Sheet and ask support team to fill out the reports there, so we as proofreaders can see it and report to our translators team members, or you could even make this doc public, as there no big reason to hide that, you surely don't want to include reporters e-mail or username, so that should be fine.
And this all about making translation process open and beneficial to you. When you pay probably much less, you get good quality translations and bring joy to people that volunteer for you, the same as Discord official server moderators.
Thank you for reading and I look forward for your answer on the issue, Discord.
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If you are the one, who liked and still want to be included in open translation process of Discord, do not forget to vote up for this issue, so your voice counts. Have you anything to say or add, please comment on this idea.
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Commento ufficiale
Hey everyone,
We appreciate you all taking time to write in and share your thoughts about our current localization process. Since we’ve made the switch in how we localize Discord, we’ve made several process improvements to make sure that we’re providing the best experience possible when using any language.
While we are not returning to community based translations, we would love to know when there are mistakes in our provided translations, as well as suggestions on how to improve the localization in the app.
If you come across a technical error with a localized string, you can submit the issues to https://dis.gd/lang-feedback.
If there are too many errors, or you’d like to send in longer-form feedback, you can send in a support ticket to our team at https://dis.gd/support.
It’s incredibly important that we hear from people if there are issues with translations, as that’s how we can make adjustments and improve.
Cheers!
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I agree. Personally, I haven't seen any progress with translation since the crowdsourcing project got shut down. Having your users who actually use your program translate it would be much better, as proven by successful servers like Discord Feedback and Discord Testers. There's no need to pay a company to do work that you could have for essentially free. 31 -
I fully agree with your article. We hope for the best!
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This article is soooo right, Discord shouldn't have left the Crowdin translation process, it was so much easier, and faster...
I feel like this Company doesn't even exist, I haven't seen any of their translation on my Discord client yet, after 5 months.
Anyway,you have my support on that!
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You're right dude!
I agree with everything!
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Something I've noticed with the company is that when they came in, more reports of incorrect translations started popping up.
Whether these are actual mistakes or just actual errors I'm not sure, this shouldn't be happening from a company like this.If Discord is to bring out these changes I propose that;
- They bring Pirate English back
- We get our fair share of goodies (official server, badge, etc)
- and that company works closely with us to proofread translations.
Make incorrect translation reports stop showing up!
18 -
i totally agree with you.
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I totally agree! I made a lot of really good friends translating, and I want to do it again.
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I agree with this!
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I also strongly agree, but I would edit these two parts:
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The company, actually, if you really need, can work with us together. They may provide translations first which we, as the community, will proofread and suggest better variants. But I think it's just overpaying for nothing.
- But, you have made a valid point about the legal documents, which should not be translated by the community. And actually, you can translate them independently, you already translate change logs and support site differently.
I would have written this:
- The company, and the translation community should work separately. The translation company should only translate legal stuff like important strings in the clients and legal documents like the TOS, guidelines, Privacy Policy, etc... the translations should go live as soon as possible but the translation community should be able to proofread and suggest better variants.
- There are other places where the translation community could not get into it because we weren't allowed to (eg. Discord Support, Developer Documentations, Change Logs) these should be either translated by the community/proofreaders or either be able to report bad/non in-context translations.
They seems more fitting this way.
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The company, actually, if you really need, can work with us together. They may provide translations first which we, as the community, will proofread and suggest better variants. But I think it's just overpaying for nothing.
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I agree with you. In my language (Lithuanian), as I've seen, only the Discord Store is being translated. That's it. For ex. Hypesquad section appeared a few months ago and it's still not translated into my language. That's sad, that they can't translate the core features of Discord.
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You're totally right. Discord, why you betrayed us? ;w;
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Couldn't agree more. You definitely should listen to Manfre's advice. Great suggestion and very well written.
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Manfre, thank you for the suggestions above! I absolutely agree with your version instead. I've made some edits to the text, please see if it's okay and I didn't miss anything. There are some additions based on the experience and how the things usually done in other open organizations 🙂
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I participated in Korean Language Translation, and it was really one of the best experience I've had so I do miss the project.
I won't really blame discord for whatever inconveniences occurred, but it is true that it doesn't really feel efficient in current state. Though, while I was participating I wished we had better organization of structures, especially on the context part which we, as group of translators, struggled. Even today I sometimes get Koreans asking about untranslated parts around Discord-- which isn't a huge deal in most part as you can guess by context.
I wouldn't say community translation was smooth experience for all languages though. As for Korean, it just didn't really feel like anything were approved as they lacked proofreaders so we only had to rely on voting; which didn't really work out like we wanted to because it seemed like a handful of around 5 were active in discussions. At least sometimes a few strings would go through approval, but the whole voting system wasn't efficient as we really needed more than a handful to fix something that had wrong translation-- iirc some strings had over 20 votes but with only 5 of us actively discussing on chat, changing that would be pretty much impossible.
The experience was stressing, but the fact that we even had the choice to fix errors and improve the user experience first hand was really what drove us as community contributors. Right now, such choice isn't really there anymore as it seems like we report them and wait until we forget about it. I would really love to see the community translations come back.
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The only thing I would like to ask is to make Ukrainian on a par with Russian, so that it can also be used on all Discord sites, and not just chats.
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YkrOpChik, this is not only for Ukrainian language! Many languages actually weren't included on site and this isn't right and something to change too.
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I agree very much with a lot of these things!
Though, I'm not quite a fan of: "Upload large strings (such as e-mails, pages) as separate text files, so we able to translate the sentence for sentence instead of the whole document. That is easy to proofread and translate. If you are not able to do it on Crowdin, use public GitHub repository instead and accept Pull Requests.", as I think it should just stay with everything on Crowdin, for ease.
Also, not a big fan of the: "Make and upload subtitles for video, so we able to make “Don't be a broom” videos accessible and maybe Ivan Popkov perestanet ispolzovat venik (excuse my Russian here)", as YouTube already should have a feature for that, which they can enable, called community contribution. It works very well, and is very good at making the subtitles with timestamps.
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Yeah, absolutely agree with you. The client translation is stuck right now.
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Sorry if you receive repetitive e-mail notification about this post. My previous post by some reason disappeared and pending approval for two days already. I'm trying to repost it, so it maybe will not require approval. I will also remove some links from the post, that are not important.
Thanks for the input, HeroGamers! I'm sorry for the confusion these lines may caused.
Actually, I agree that everything should stay on Crowdin, but something may prevent it being “easy” for us or for Discord and that is why I use form of “If you are not able.” Large files are translatable piece by piece, where there is no approved translation available, Crowdin will export an original, untranslated line. That should be quite alright, all Discord needs is to upload the large strings as .txt files, they can identify them by file names and give us readable description of file on Crowdin. But IF there will not be ability to export files that easy (I don't really know what can prevent that, but IF), they may create GitHub repository and accept Pull Requests from translators there. I think you may agree, that it is better than nothing.
For the subtitles, yes, there is YouTube translation tool, but it is actually better to have centralized place for translations, let me show you two screenshots (linked to Imgur, to not make this page use a lot of traffic):
- This is how the subtitles' translation process looks on Crowdin: we have comments, terms and any other things we have on Crowdin, only those who are in the translation team can see and translate the file, exporting probably can be done automatically using YouTube API (not a Crowdin function) from own CI utility
- And this is how the same process looks on YouTube: yes, preview and ability to add a line or source file (if there's none!), but no terms, no comments, everyone is able to open and submit changes and you cannot track down who made them, only single variant (so fun with vandalism (that is a thing)), no history as well, requires final approval by the video creator which locks the possibility to further improve translation
YouTube tool to contribute translation is okay for the first time until automatic upload tool is created and implemented: again, file names can be used for identification (SWzB1mx2o5k . fr-FR . sbv → {video ID} . {language} . sbv → French (France) subtitles for video “The History of the Discord Hypesquad”) and we still can see human readable names thanks to Crowdin. Personally, I would like to use Crowdin, because it is more functional for collaboration, I can deal with that we do not see the preview, but if we have good timings and strings split adequately.
So that's it! If you think the original idea could be improved, please reply here in comments 🙂
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I totally agree you my man.
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^
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PrOfEsSiOnAl TrAnSlAtOrS...They didn't translate the Russian (In the Desktop and Mobile). Shame for these professionals...
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I fully agree with this.
Game Library update is still not translated to Russian ,_,2 -
nice idea 2 -
I fully agree.
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I fully agree with your article.
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