Teams and translation quality Options

[Baronius]

First of all, I would like to react to Rigel's post (see the general part of my post in its last paragraphs):

it's mold in the meaning of "moisissure" in French. That is why the golem is green.

I began modding by making my own trad of The Grey Clan cause i really liked it and was thinking "wow it's one of the greatest mod ever why its not already traduced in french!!!" and despite the fact that the Doghmatiques where working on it already with your agreement (i'm a rebel). So i've made the trad of The Grey Clan quite entierly and i traduced "mold" after big brainstorming by "moisissure " like you say . In the french current trad made by the Doghmatiques "mold golem" is traduced by "golem de mousse"; "mousse" means its like a bob sponge golem or something like that ; i'll speak about that detail to Graoumf the coordinator of the Doghmatiques or maybe you can change it yourself in the .tra if you want Baronius, after all it's your MOD; however the trad is good and it's a detail !

Here one exemple of a line from the current trad :

@77 = ~Animer le Golem de Mousse~

Too bad for The Grey Clan Episode 2 but maybe a day ! I know it's hard work to mod and it takes so much time...

See you one day when i'll got to ask for a prefix and i wish the best to you and BWL

Thank you for your kind words and reassurance about GCE2. One day when I both have enough time and motivation/mood to prefer (i.e. to give better priority to) GCE2 and my modding, I might return to it.

About the mold golem: yes, inform Graoumf about it, so they can update their own translation. I will update in GCE1 in the next update I'll release (I don't know when it will be; probably not in the near future), I think I have other things to include in it anyway (such as the Russian translation); currently, these things are available through the GCE forum to players.

The general part. My principles about translations:

• I find quality important in every respect (especially with the technical design and implementation of mods), however, I have no time to deal with translation verification. (It would be quite complicated to get reliable help for each given language, to get the quality of translations verified, which teams to prefer etc., it just wouldn't be worth it, obviously.) So I trust the skills of the translators who translate the mod to their own language.
• Due to the above, I usually say yes to the first translator who would like to translate my given mod (and unless there are serious counter-arguments to it, this translation will be considered the "official" one included in the mod).
• While I don't intend to spend time with the translation aspect (generally, I don't intend to -- and mostly cannot -- spend much IE modding-related time), I'm open to examine individual cases. So if a person believes that the team has made a really poor work in a translation to his/her language (or just has some suggestions) and his/her requests have been ignored by the original translator(s), he or she can contact me. As far as it's possible, I will examine these cases to find an alternative (for example, even my mod can contain two translations in the same language, and players can choose; of course, these are exceptional cases).

[Baronius]

But the english translation of "mousse" is Moss, which is green too. We also want to keep a short number of syllables. If it's ok for Baronius, we prefer kepting "mousse".

The golem is made of mold, not moss (obviously not the same!). Translations should reserve the meaning of the grammatical entities, and not introduce undesired changes. "Moss is green too, just like the golem, so why not" isn't a good argument (I'm not quoting anyone here, merely just representing with the quote what happened). On a side note, about the ambiguity of "mold": a lot of words have several meanings in most human languages, this shouldn't be an obstacle for translators: they can just consult the mod author (i.e. me) to provide a description (meta-information) about the word(s) in question.

To summarize, my golem is made of mold, not moss. All translations should reflect this.