Post subject: TASVideos language translation task force
Editor, Player (123)
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I've always had a major interest in language and linguistics, which in fact sometimes forms into an obsession. Now that I have become an editor, and have really started to sift through pages on the TASVideos site, I'm starting to notice more than ever that many pages do have a version of that page in another language (usually Russian, for some reason); however, despite that, there are so few languages represented. This I see as something that needs to be seriously looked at. The reason? Well, as http://tasvideos.org/WelcomeToTASVideos.html says, there are over 100,000 unique visitors to this site every month, which adds up to over a million (presumably) every year. A lot of people who will come to this site will prefer to read site pages in another language (probably because English is not their native language). Wikipedia and Wiktionary are two sites other than TASVideos in which I've been long-term actively involved. There are literally hundreds of language-versions of Wikipedia (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Wikipedias for all of them) and a similarly large amount of language versions of Wiktionary. Personally, in all the time I've been seeing TASers, etc., I've come across TASers that I knew spoke any of the following languages natively: Dansk (Danish) Deutsch (German) Ελληνικά (Greek) English (obviously) Español (Spanish) Français (French) 한국어 (Korean) Bahasa Indonesia (Indonesian) Italiano (Italian) Nederlands (Dutch) 日本語 (Japanese) Polski (Polish) Português (Portuguese) Русский (Russian) Suomi (Finnish) Svenska (Swedish) Tagalog (main language of the Philippines) Tiếng Việt (Vietnamese) Türkçe (Turkish) Українська (Ukrainian) 中文 (Chinese) And it's not over. If we really have over a million visitors to this site every day, I have no doubt in my mind that at least a few people if not many who natively speak any of the following languages below visit this site (look them up on Wikipedia if you're unfamiliar with any of them): Afrikaans (Afrikaans) العربية (Arabic) Azərbaycanca (Azerbaijani) Беларуская (Belarusian) Català (Catalan) Čeština (Czech) Cymraeg (Welsh) Eesti (Estonian) فارسی (Persian) Հայերեն (Armenian) Gaeilge (Irish) हिन्दी (Hindi) Íslenska (Icelandic) ಕನ್ನಡ (Kannada) עברית (Hebrew) ქართული (Georgian) Қазақша (Kazakh) Kiswahili (Swahili) Latviešu (Latvian) Lëtzebuergesch (Luxembourgish) Lietuvių (Lithuanian) Magyar (Hungarian) Македонски (Macedonian) Монгол (Mongolian) Norsk (Norwegian [bokmal/nynorsk]) Oʻzbekcha/ўзбекча (Uzbek) ភាសាខ្មែរ (Khmer) Română (Romanian) Shqip (Albanian) Sicilianu (Sicilian) Slovenčina (Slovak) Slovenščina (Slovene) Srpskohrvatski (Serbo-Croatian), which includes all its dialects that are sometimes confused to be separate languages: Bosanski (Bosnian), Hrvatski (Croatian), Srpski (Serbian) ไทย (Thai) Türkmençe (Turkmen) God I just LOVE long lists of languages. I don't know why; I guess it's just my thing. Additionally, some cool, but not really useful I suppose, ones would be: Esperanto Latina (Latin) Anyway, there are some that I haven't mentioned, but you get the idea. A lot of people speaking a lot of different languages come here every month. Now, I don't claim to specialize in foreign languages, so I can't do the translations alone. There are quite a few languages besides English that I can speak enough to have casual conversations and can do a few other things with them, but I don't know any of said languages well enough to translate complete documents while knowing I will not make translation errors and grammatical mistakes. There are a lot of resources I have at my disposal for translation: Wiktionary has https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Wiktionary:Translation_requests , where you can literally ask for a passage to be translated and someone who is knowledgable will come and translate it (though this doesn't ALWAYS work). Or, as I've mentioned above, this community is linguistically diverse; I can ask someone who speaks a certain language and knows the context of TASing to translate some of the pages here. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Introduction Wikipedia gives 98 languages for their site introduction, while http://tasvideos.org/WelcomeToTASVideos.html we only give two for ours (and by the way, this is the most amount of languages for any given page I've seen on the site thus far). Now I'm not saying we absolutely have to provide a thousand languages for every page, but I just feel like there should be more attention paid towards page translation. So I'm asking for your help. Any users who speak any foreign languages and feel comfortable translating long passages without error into your language(s), please help me to translate several important pages on the site, including all the introductory and guidelines/rules pages. Also, during this movement I may start getting translations and may add a few pages at a time, just to give you a heads up (but I will let someone know every time beforehand if I do). By doing all of this, we will help our content to be better understood by all audiences. Thank you in advance.
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Also, to follow this idea, we need something like a Translation module, to show available languages for each page, as well as the language you are currently on. The way it is done now, the WelcomeToTasVideos page has a small header, in plaintext, linking to other languages; but this will get tedious to update if much more languages are added, since you will need to edit that header for every single page translation as well.
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More importantly, since it's fully based on someone willing to put effort and actually translate a page, we need to reward such people. I suggest the Translator rank. Russian in the one covered best is just because we have a guy who likes to translate pages to Russian. But it also takes a person knowledgeable in TAS to fix everything that a translator might've misunderstood. So it's an effort of at least 2 people, if you want a reliable source of info. Lastly, if more people speaking different languages feel like contributing, we might invent a better way to organize this. But I obviously wouldn't oppose if that happened right now!
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It's a great project that I'd like to contribute to. There would be a little problem that is, when someone add/remove content on a page, how to do it for all the others in different languages ? It would require the editor to make a english translation of what he added and the translators could just translate it in its language and update the content, but some content would be really outdated for the pages that aren't well supported. So this require a warning on top of the page that would redirect to the English one (or something like this) to be sure the visitor get all the missing content.
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feos wrote:
I suggest the Translator rank.
I second this.
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Mothrayas and I had a long chat on IRC about this, and we both came to the conclusion that there are (for now) 10 languages that should have translations here: * Chinese * Finnish * French * German * Italian * Japanese * Portuguese * Russian * Spanish * Swedish The reason we decided this is because these languages tend to have a lot of speakers, a lot of people in the community itself who speak said languages, and have a lot of speakers who would be more likely than other languages to be involved in gaming specifically. Personally, I would not be opposed to having more languages, and if anyone has any translations available for languages other than the ten listed, feel free to contact me and I'll save them. I will shortly make topics for each of the 10 languages in their proper language forums. I will then make at least one topic concerning languages outside those 10, in case they will ever be applied.
Post subject: Re: TASVideos language translation task force
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Ready Steady Yeti wrote:
Wikipedia and Wiktionary are two sites other than TASVideos in which I've been long-term actively involved. There are literally hundreds of language-versions of Wikipedia (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Wikipedias for all of them) and a similarly large amount of language versions of Wiktionary.
One minor problem with that comparison: The different language versions of Wikipedia are not translations of the English version. Most often the same page in different languages is wildly different (eg. quite often the English version might be two dozens pages long, while the same page on another language might be half a page long.) Generally, people are not translating the English article (or any other article for that matter) into their own language. Instead, they are just writing an independent article on the subject in their own language. But yeah, maybe that's fine here as well.
Post subject: Count me in.
Editor, Reviewer, Skilled player (1358)
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Yesterday I took 2 hours to correct thoroughly the Welcome page in Italian version, since it was very bad. I may be not the best with English, but on the other hand I think I'm very capable for translating to Italian. So count me in.
xy2_ wrote:
Also, to follow this idea, we need something like a Translation module, to show available languages for each page, as well as the language you are currently on. The way it is done now, the WelcomeToTasVideos page has a small header, in plaintext, linking to other languages; but this will get tedious to update if much more languages are added, since you will need to edit that header for every single page translation as well.
I think the best solution would be to add third-level domains. For example, jp.tasvideos.org/WelcomeToTASVideos.html would be the Japanese version of the welcome page. This would make it much more simple to perform a mass-translating operation.
Warp wrote:
Generally, people are not translating the English article (or any other article for that matter) into their own language. Instead, they are just writing an independent article on the subject in their own language.
When I corrected the translation I mentioned, I tried to keep close to the original text as much as possible, with using adaptations only when strictly necessary. I've done so because I think that page is especially important and has some storic relevance, so I guess it would be fine to be more loose with most other pages.
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I could help with German translations, but I'm sure there are plenty of others that can help with this language as well. Just let me know if you need some help! Technically, Greek is my second language, but I definitely wouldn't be of any use with it, as my knowledge in Greek writing is awful. Also, I don't think Greek is a top priority.
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andypanther wrote:
Technically, Greek is my second language, but I definitely wouldn't be of any use with it, as my knowledge in Greek writing is awful. Also, I don't think Greek is a top priority.
You could still translate at least the welcome page, since it's the most important one. By the way, I think the top priority pages that need to be translated are the ones that already have a Russian version: https://www.google.it/search?q=site%3Atasvideos.org+ru.html About the top priority language, I think it's pretty obvious that we need Japanese.
my personal page - my YouTube channel - my GitHub - my Discord: thunderaxe31 <Masterjun> if you look at the "NES" in a weird angle, it actually clearly says "GBA"
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I'd like to get back on something Stovent said. Having some way to know if the original english page has been changed since the (last) translation has been done. But I don't know how at all easy/hard it would be to setup. Ideas: -an automatic verification every week/month/other (simply based on the dates, last time each page has been edited) -a message on the translated page -an automated message on a specific topic about it in each language (or simply a "translation topic" in english, since it would be aimed at the translators, who can obviously read english) -it would maybe be going a little too far, but anyway, a PM to people that are "registered" as translators for the languages that need an update In my opinion, the messages on the page itself and in a specific topic would be largely enough.
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xy2_ wrote:
Also, to follow this idea, we need something like a Translation module, to show available languages for each page, as well as the language you are currently on. The way it is done now, the WelcomeToTasVideos page has a small header, in plaintext, linking to other languages; but this will get tedious to update if much more languages are added, since you will need to edit that header for every single page translation as well.
While I agree with translating pages, I also agree on the need for scaling. I'm not sure how difficult it would be to code this, but I hope it doesn't take too much effort (unlike the movie rating module rework).
Editor, Skilled player (1536)
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Before translating articles on the site some of the original english pages may need a rewrite, most of these are not up to date with the current TASing standards, are to specifically bounded to one emulator or don't explain the content very well to newbies. I checked Articles -> Movies -> Movies Making http://tasvideos.org/LuaScripting.html and subpages: Only hold information for mostly FCEUX, SNES9x and DeSmuME. http://tasvideos.org/MemorySearch.html: Only an example for the easiest one, but not for the more difficult ones. http://tasvideos.org/EmulatorResources/RamWatch.html: Too emulator specific. http://tasvideos.org/LiveStreams.html: Outdated content. http://tasvideos.org/TASTutorial.html: Dead links and one outdated content in "Various TAS process demonstrations"
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TASeditor wrote:
Before translating articles on the site some of the original english pages may need a rewrite, most of these are not up to date with the current TASing standards, are to specifically bounded to one emulator or don't explain the content very well to newbies. I checked Articles -> Movies -> Movies Making http://tasvideos.org/LuaScripting.html and subpages: Only hold information for mostly FCEUX, SNES9x and DeSmuME. http://tasvideos.org/MemorySearch.html: Only an example for the easiest one, but not for the more difficult ones. http://tasvideos.org/EmulatorResources/RamWatch.html: Too emulator specific. http://tasvideos.org/LiveStreams.html: Outdated content. http://tasvideos.org/TASTutorial.html: Dead links and one outdated content in "Various TAS process demonstrations"
As a suggestion for anyone updating those pages, some images would be helpful. Example of what I mean. I'm not sure how feasible it may be however, to get pics that works for a wide range of emulators though.
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ThunderAxe31 wrote:
By the way, I think the top priority pages that need to be translated are the ones that already have a Russian version: https://www.google.it/search?q=site%3Atasvideos.org+ru.html
Right now we track the translations using this little thingy: http://tasvideos.org/RU.html Or, to be exact, its referrers list. I also usually list the articles I'm working on in this topic. My thanks to feos for the editing btw.
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jlun2 wrote:
I'm not sure how feasible it may be however, to get pics that works for a wide range of emulators though.
That gave me the idea that if a feature being explained is applicable to more than one emulator, and a related screenshot for each emulator is inserted in the article to visually demonstrate, the image could be by default for the most popular emulator, and eg. below it there could be links for the images for other emulators. These links would actually run a piece of javascript that would load the correspondent image and replace the one currently being shown. (If I understand correctly, this is perfectly possible with javascript.) This would be a very compact (in terms of page layout) way of showing such images, for different emulators.
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I've helped in the past with translation / localization to Spanish for another page so I have already some experience with it & would gladly help here too.
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Editor, Skilled player (1337)
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It would be good to have a first list of pages with high translation priority. Count me in for the french translations.
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I can help translate some main pages to portuguese.
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Well, for starters there's always the welcome page to try your writing skills out. http://tasvideos.org/WelcomeToTASVideos.html Back in 2011 when the first efforts in translations were made, the following pages were considered important: * http://tasvideos.org/MovieRules.html * http://tasvideos.org/Guidelines.html * http://tasvideos.org/SubmissionInstructions.html * http://tasvideos.org/SiteRules.html Several other thoughts I'd like to share: 1. I'd also consider another important article: http://tasvideos.org/Helping.html Since the article also describes the ways to contribute to the site besides TASing, such as torrent seeding, uploading, rating and so on. Actually, it might be a good idea to update the article with the info regarding the translation efforts. Not before such info is ready, of course. 2. Secondly, we need a place (eg. a forum topic or something) where all the translations (at least for the same language) could be listed along with the data about who is working on what article for which language (and someone has to update this data regularly), so we won't end up having several people doing the same task. Long story short, when you start translating an article, let people know that you're working on it. 3. The drafts for the publication can be shared via sites like, say, Pastebin: http://pastebin.com There might be a better way though. 4. It is recommended to refrain from submitting partial translations. 5. Lastly, an important thing. Getting started working on an article, DO NOT copy its visual representation as a source text. Instead, use the article's source text which you can get by clicking the link at the bottom of the page:
The source will contain markup tags so the result of your work could be already formatted.
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I could help with translating to Portuguese as well,but i have a question,where would i write it?
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Editor, Skilled player (1337)
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The french translation of the main page should be something like that : https://pastebin.com/GMaFXLWU Though a double check by Grincevent or someone else would be highly appreciated.
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lapogne36 wrote:
The french translation of the main page should be something like that : https://pastebin.com/GMaFXLWU Though a double check by Grincevent or someone else would be highly appreciated.
I'm on it, I've mainly started with eliminating some typos and trying to see if some sentences can be reworked to be more "smooth". I don't yet take too much into account the translation fidelity, just comparing quickly, but I'll do a 2nd pass to see if some stuff can be said another way to be more precise. (I know, those steps should go in the opposite order, but it doesn't hurt to check twice ^^)
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I've just finished reviewing lapogne's french translation (first pass, if it needs more). I did add my comments on what corrections I've made or other thoughts, all of them are after each paragraph and signaled with "€€€" (I had to find some specific symbol that isn't used anywhere ^^). https://pastebin.com/drdzfz6j
Editor, Player (123)
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I've now created separate topics for all 10 languages mentioned above of which Mothrayas has approved. These topics are listed here (not listed by priority but alphabetized by language code): * http://tasvideos.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=19463 German (de) * http://tasvideos.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=19458 Spanish (es) * http://tasvideos.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=19460 Finnish (fi) * http://tasvideos.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=19457 French (fr) * http://tasvideos.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=19462 Italian (it) * http://tasvideos.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=19455 Japanese (ja) * http://tasvideos.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=19459 Portuguese (pt) * http://tasvideos.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=19456 Russian (ru) * http://tasvideos.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=19464 Swedish (sv) * http://tasvideos.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=19461 Chinese (zh) I thank you all so much for your enthusiasm in all of this. I will help in any way I can. Additionally, there are other languages in the world. There may be future consensus to include more languages than those above. If you are willing to translate into other languages than those above, I advise you not to hesitate. I have a personal website and would be more than happy to archive our translations into currently non-approved languages such as Greek (already mentioned), Czech, Polish, Ukrainian, Danish, Dutch, Indonesian, Vietnamese, Romanian, among many others, in case they will ever be accepted. I suggest to PM me specific translations in such languages if you're willing to take the time to do this. Nonetheless, I'll try to do some translating myself. I'd say the language I'm most knowledgable in lexically is Danish (I have some rather distant family members from/in Denmark, which sparked that interest), though I've seen extremely few Danes in the TASVideos community, and all that I've ever seen are extremely inactive that being said. I have some intermediate knowledge in other languages too, like Spanish and French, but I feel it'd be more useful to have our natives translate those as I'm not nearly as good as them at it. :)