Community translations for store content

It’s been brought up that some people would like to provide translations for the store page content for Thrive, and to officially list Thrive as supporting the languages that are translated by the community.

I feel like these are pretty huge decisions, because ticking the box that “yes, we support language x” means that we need to actually make sure that the language is updated for each new Thrive version and hasn’t been done like really low quality. As professional translators probably cost quite a lot, especially considering how many languages we have, I don’t think we should yet do that.

The second point is related to a person who went ahead and made a translation of the Steam store page of Thrive into another language. For these, I think they need to be good quality and verified that no trolls have put profanities in them, because I think there’s even the risk of being thrown off Steam if we don’t take care of the other languages the store page is in. So we need to really trust the people making the translations / we need a way to verify the translations. Maybe professional translators would be willing to take a look for glaring problems for cheap?

And one final point is that as we’ll be in early access for a long time, the store page will need to be kept up to date, probably at least a couple of times a year, so these store page translators would also need to commit to long term, though I suppose in this case it would be fine to just remove a specific language for the store page if it gets outdated as it doesn’t impact the purchased product of anyone.

I’m really busy with other stuff, so I can’t spearhead this initiative and also I’m a bit hesitant about committing to needing to maintain these translations, which may cost money if the community members doing the initial translations disappear.

If we decide to go with this, I think we could setup a new component on translate.revolutionarygamesstudio.com to manage the translating process of the store content.

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I setup Weblate to accept translations for the store content:

Though, before we get some kind of review process (as I mentioned in the first post in this thread) I don’t want to start putting in those translations, but people can now at least make the translations if they want. And we can figure out how we can review the text later.

Peer review could be one of the solutions of course but this will only be effective when there are plenty of people who translates and some dedicated language maintainers. If this is to be considered, I think an upgrade of the translation organization is necessary where it would make sense to have a dedicated translation team to the Thrive dev team as suggested by @Maxonovien.

Each language would have trusted maintainers who are responsible for the language they oversee. This can be multiple people to spread out the work. A good candidate can probably be picked by the amount of activity and consistency of their contributions, and eventually after some time they can be offered the maintainer role or they apply themselves (like the current application process). I think once maintainers are established and contributions are solid, we can tick the box that says a particular language is supported? This is assuming we can untick the box back if said maintainers somehow got inactive at some point and there are no replacements.

In terms of translation quality, there may be some tradeoff here and there which should be expected given all of this is volunteer driven as is Thrive. But optimistically the larger and more contributor works on a language it should hopefully balance it out.

Anyways I’m just spitballing here and this may or may not be feasible given some of the limitation of our dev team resources at the moment and probably needs to be more fully thought out since this will be quite a step further to our relatively new translation workflow.

That’s kind of the second main problem I have. Let’s say someone sees Thrive and that it supports language X, and they buy it, with the expectation that they’ll get the full Thrive release once it comes out. But then oops that person doing translations for X, leaves. What then? A person has bought Thrive with certain expectations that we no longer can fulfil (without hiring a translator in the worst case if we can’t find another person to do the translation for free).

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Yeah I think that’s a fair concern. However I know this has been said before but I think in this case we don’t have to explicitly state that official translations are supported (whether it be in the supported languages column or other Steam instruments), rather we can instead state that a community made translations is available in the game descriptions or some other place. At least until Thrive comes out of early access phase and locale strings are all laid out which will be a long time. And if even then some translation is missing, people should expect that since this is still an Early Access game and is community-made. Perhaps that would be an incentive for some people to contribute (or at least the really minority haha).

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I personally think that guaranteed translation is unfeasible until the game is finished and we no longer need to constantly keep other languages up to date, so I don’t think we should tag the game as translated until then.

In the mean time I agree that we should at the very least state that community translations are available somewhere on the store page or something.

Is someone going to look at those? The language support won’t show up in search or the sidebar. And if we put it too early in the game description I think it detracts from the page’s effectiveness, leading to needing to put that quite far down on the store page, which further reduces its effectiveness.