Genuinely not being snarky, but how would you even go about fixing the German translation for example? There’s several hundred(!) typos, grammatical errors, idiosyncrasies and mistranslations in there.
And missing parts of spell descriptions. Like Lucifria burning all enemies which is amazing in Arena - it not mentioned in German.
I’m still chuckling about the spell that targets “Feine” (delicate, fine) instead of Feinde (enemies).
And then they went about and translated references to song texts or other cultural references that we also know in English and not on German. Believe it or not but we listen to music that’s in English in English.
Someone clearly does the translations who has no clue about the game nor what’s a cultural reference that doesn’t make sense if it’s translated to German. 
This has been changed a while ago.
And besides Hawx won’t have to do it all by herself and she told me that it seems to be more complicated to “undo” false translations.
“Somehow they are not allowed to accept community provided translations”
But that’s also not the point.
We gonna try to establish a list of imprtant things the devs should keep an eye on and have it all a little bit more gathered on one or two sheets.
Like a ToDo-list.
Not more or less.
If this works out and the major bugs start to vanish, we can add more minor things to the list. But for the moment I think translation failures are not the most wanted/important thing that need to done 
1 Like
Oh nice.
I don’t play in German so I didn’t know they finally changed it (it was missing for quite some time).
Still an example for how bad some of these things are sometimes.
For another game on steam, two friends and myself made the complete translation into german of everything. All it takes is a complete excel file provided by the devs with a format like “stringID” “english strings” “translated strings”. This doesn’t have to be provided publicly. Then just use docs.google.com to edit online with multiple committed people at once. The excel sheet can also be used for small short comments/discussions among the translators, (we also used a seperate discord too), about wording etc. This will get rid of 99% of all errors. Errors that would still occur could still be reported and worked on quickly
All you need is - due to the massive amount:
a) a small number of passionate and precise players speaking english and german that want to do the translations and that are chosen or whatever you’d like to call it…
b) time to work on this
c) willing devs that provide such a file in the first place and also implement it afterwards
I’m pretty sure, a) and b) isn’t a big problem here.
3 Likes
Just saying that there might be some restrictions either from any company and/or the government.
I have no idea or proof if that could be a problem somehow.
Let’s see what the devs reply will be to this.
Just wanted to pop in and acknowledge this thread although I haven’t had time to read it all yet, I will bookmark it so I can go through it in the next week or 2.
Currently we’re sort of looking at this area again - communication and transparency.
We’re reviewing the beta program again, in more depth this time, maybe ideas around better communication or an idea of a “council” could be integrated some way into the beta program. I will read up on this thread over the next week or 2 to see if there’s anything we could integrate. We’ll also be looking at how other games do it well and what we can do to emulate that within our scope.
For now, I just got back to work today after having the flu all week and other team members have been out sick as well so next week will mostly be catch up work then we can get into it more.
The community is great at sharing how you feel and what the top issues and feedback are.
It’s the team’s job to try to reduce how often issues happen, there’s nothing you folks can do to help us with this, that’s on us.
Regarding translations, it’s an ethical problem and possibly a legal one here in Australia where volunteers can’t/shouldn’t be doing the job of paid employees and translation is a paid job. Otherwise, we’re completely grateful at how generous our community are with offering their time to translate the game for us - we’re just not in a position to take you up on it.
Click here for story time! Feel free to disregard unless you're a giant nerd like me
I always pull this story out whenever translation issues come up. The last company I worked at supported 42 languages/dialects. There was 1 Translator and 1-2 proof readers per language. All translations were from German or English, so we had a minimum of 80 people reading the English text PLUS the developers who wrote the text and there were STILL spelling mistakes and slip ups.
I think it has a lot to do with the fact that humans don’t read every letter of every word, we read in chunks, so your brain basically recognises the word based on the first couple of letters, the last letter or 2 and the shape of the word and basically it fills in the gaps for you unless you’re really sitting there analysing every letter - which you just won’t do over thousands of words because your brain gets fatigued by it and starts subconsciously working out short cuts like the aforementioned things.
Spell checkers are great but won’t pick up grammatical issues, or issues if the typo makes another real word - so there’s definitely tools and methods to try to ensure the text is as good as possible (some of my favourite are a simple spell checker, grammarly and yoast). However, based on this experience I’ve had I’m convinced that no matter what you do there will always be mistakes in any kind of text no matter what you do. We’ve had community members submit corrected text with mistakes in the corrections. It’s really not as easy as it seems. It doesn’t excuse the mistakes and my story might sound extreme but there it is haha
5 Likes
Feel free to hire me for translations. german - english 
Edit: Or at least for corrections 
1 Like
Actually countless examples of “the players” asking before about certain stuff scheduled events even start - without answers. Possibly without “the team” even checking up on the matter. Only so that on set date the predicted fails… happen.
I don’t want to read to much into it, but that sentence or that part of “that’s on us” comes across like “pff whatever”, because “the team” has yet to actually deliver proof of “caring”, not just for a day or a week. No, consistently. And if some bugs already occur, then if someone goes to have dinner, it would be awesome if another person could actually take over and not have the topic ignored until someone eventually takes pity. Same if someone gets ill, or is “off” due to whatever reason.
Hm, translation is a paid job, but what about “voluntary” doing it as some already offered? What about beta testing which is also “voluntary” - just as example?
You could - in theory still “release” such a excel file with the language strings, f.e. to users of the beta program with “exclusive viewing and editing rights” to a small amount of users then and see what you’ll end up with. This could eventually be double, triple, countless times re-checked. It is basically nothing else than someone using their free time posting useful comments in such a forum. Or is it?
Otherwise just move to nzl, because I had no problems translating a whole game for a dev from nzl, without payment. The three people involved in translating into german simply got “acknowledged” in a small ingame page. We didn’t even ask for that. That was a voluntary doing by the dev, just a small appreciation.
4 Likes
…a legal one here in Australia where volunteers can’t/shouldn’t be doing the job of paid employees and translation is a paid job.
then you would have paid people like Taran, Hawx, Gary, El Duderino (just to name a few) since ages!
2 Likes
I don’t disagree that in the grand scheme of things, translation issues are relatively minor. But here are three points I’d like to make:
-
The rate at which translation errors are introduced outpaces the rate at which they’re fixed. Coming up with a plan to keep this in check would be… advisable?
-
Every patch, people in our guild alliance ask why some new troop or weapon doesn’t work as advertised. More often than not, the answer is that the translation is just wrong. Forcing people to switch back and forth between English for reference and their local language for play is rather annoying (to put it mildly) and will drive a not insignificant number of people away.
-
It’s not just one language. We’ve had machine-translated Chinese gibberish, a stream of requests to fix various fundamental issues with the Russian translation without any sign of improvement over the years (I think even the most prolific Russian bug-reporters have become resigned at this point)
Regarding translations, it’s an ethical problem and possibly a legal one here in Australia where volunteers can’t/shouldn’t be doing the job of paid employees and translation is a paid job.
That’s fair. But here’s a blunt question: Why not hire someone at least semi-qualified for the job? Again, not being snarky, also not mincing words. Whoever’s translating to German doesn’t know the language well enough to be doing this for a living or even as a side-gig - yes, it is THAT bad. Imagine playing GoW and a troop’s English translation talks about ‘purpelian’ gem. Funny the first 3 times you see that one, I’m sure. Not so funny after finding out that the translator is 100% convinced ‘purpelian’ is the correct way to spell ‘purple’. I’d imagine that one, in any language, wouldn’t slip past proofreaders…
5 Likes
I agree with the translation aspect. Many in our guild are German and post as such in the pet rescue channel etc which can be quite funny because most German words aren’t as easy to make an educated guess at. They are happy to translate and such stuff could be added to a decicated area aimed at resolving translation issues. I know in discord you can just select one of the flags to a post and said post will translate into the language of the selected flag. But I think removing all “mother tongue” spell inaccuries should be addressed 1st to ensure resultant translation (where identified) is also correct.
Thank you for taking the time to respond and letting us know communication is being worked on! I know every time you (or any staff member) posts things like this you always get lashback and upset individuals, but I hope this doesn’t influence future communication. There will always be people who are frustrated by something, whether reasonable or not, and these people are often very vocal. I’m not saying to ignore criticism or upset players; plenty of them/us have very valid points that need addressed. But in the past, frustrated players have caused staff to threaten to cut off communication with the community, which is not something that should happen in any game. Pull valid criticism from negative posts and don’t take them personally - we as the community don’t mean them personally 99% of the time (and the 1% that does should be dealt with with mutes and bans). Even the most negative players on these forums who may seem impossible to please make negative posts because they’re frustrated by the direction of a game they care a lot about.
While bugs have been plentiful lately, I feel communication has at least taken a step in the right direction from where it was months ago. Thank you for your continued work on this!
2 Likes
Pro tip - hire someone whose native tongue is German and who also speaks English to translate from English to German.
The results will always be a more correct and natural German than if you hire an English speaker who has German as a second language.
Ref. Translations
As a linguist, I struggle to envision the low QA threshold that is tolerated in IP2 when it comes to translations (programming, design, dedication, and customer-relations aside): I’ve had the chance to see the ‘French’ mistakes that are still running jokes among my french-speaking guildies, and just today someone posted “Verde Enemigos” in a ‘Spanish’ screenshot.
But the translation topic is a periodically recurring one, with the same excuses/promises being brought forth by the mods: adjust expectations/effort accordingly…
@Jeto @Kafka @OminousGMan
There are plenty of active community members who would love to keep this game alive.
And I guess both sides would benefit from something like that.
So we would really like to know your thoughts about this topic.
1 Like
All of our translators are native speakers, play Gems of War, have access to update info before it’s released so they have additional context to what they’re translating, and at least one of them is a professional translator as their day job outside of just Gems of War.
We prefer to have people who play Gems of War so they understand the context of what they’re translating.
This is either not true, or said ‘translators’ are not even bothering past Machine Translation.
Again “Verde Enemigos” is something a 4-5 y/o can recognize as incorrect Spanish Grammar.
4 Likes
Besides this doesn’t answer the topic request.
Of what language?
Who translates a songtext to German when we listen to it in English? The reference gets lost.
Or leaves out part of descriptions?
Or makes all the other various mistakes?
I think you’ve been duped regarding the capabilites or your translator.
They even mixed up the gender of one troop (can’t remember which one but I remember talking about it on a German stream).
They also translated Pan’s Valley to Pantal - it’s Pans Tal (though I would have gone for Tal des Pan).
Many things aren’t game breaking, of course, but I’m sure the people who came up with names, references, story etc had something in mind…
2 Likes