suggestions to translation

arktis · 03-24-2024, 02:46 AM

Sehr geehrte Developers,

I am a big fan of your games and played them since OOTP19. It has been a great experiences to play future and historical leagues and fictional leagues too. Sometimes, I enjoy watching fictional players surpassing existing records.

This was one of the reasons why I was so happy to hear the news of the game being translated into Korean. I thought I could finally enjoy the ultimate baseball management game much easiser. So, I waited with patience though initial versions of translation had lots of errors - e.g. automatically translated family names which should not be translated and etc.

Still, I see those errors and mistranslations while playing games. There are still mistranslated names (first names, last names, team names, nicknames, and school names), sentences with variables that are out of order, and mistranslated sentences due to the different phrase order between english and korean. I understand this situation, since there are too many texts to translate, those mistranslations, however, break immersion in the game. No one wants to read the baseball text which are not used in korean baseball and no one wants to be confused by wrong names.

So, as one of the biggest fan of your OOTP series, I have reviewed the translation texts by myself since OOTP22, and shared them in korean Internet communities. At first, I only corrected link errors, occured due to differences in spacing between Korean and English. As I saw possibilities, I corrected more texts. I tried to correct the orders of korean sentences more natural, and also changed some expressions to expressions more frequently used in Korea. I also tried to keep unity of translation among terms.

Those efforts, however, were thought to be sometimes largely meaningless, since there were some points which I could do nothing about. Because of the structural differences between Korean and English, some expressions parsed into uncomplete phrases cannot be translated properly. So, there are korean expressions like "...구장 뉴욕 양키스" (means 'the Ballpark of New York Yankies' but translated like 'New York Yankees Ballpark of ...') or "...보다 클 수 없습니다" (means 'must not be greater than' but translated like '... than must not be greater') and so on. I think I could understand how you build original english texts in game, and why original texts are segmented like this, but this make lots of errors in translations, and also large errors while reviewing the translation texts to be more natural.

For these reasons, I really want to provide some suggestions to make future translation better:
- open text generation module or translation module of the game. If you provide us these modules, I think there would a couple of players with coding abilities including me who really want to improve the quality of the tanslation.
- or at least, build as many expressions as possible in sentences. This would make the translation much eaiser and more natural. Translators don't have to worry about the translation of texts like consist of only a-word prepositions or prepositional phrases.
- or hire players who have played several years and understand the game, at least before the launch of new version. It would be a good help to improve the translations, since there are some translated texts which seems like that the former translator have not played the game.

I watched interviews saying that there are only few people developing the game, so I do understand the difficulties you have been expereinced around years. That is why I am fully ready to help you make better games and make more players to play this game. I will continue to do my best to do what I can do on my position.

I hope to hear from you soon. Thank you.

mit herzlichen Grüßen
Arktis

Lukas Berger · 03-25-2024, 07:01 AM

Hi,

You make some very good suggestions!

We will have to take a look at what we can do here in order to have some more folks help out with fixing and improving the translation.

This is a difficult thing to set up, because anyone that has direct access to this needs to be highly trusted not to add inappropriate content here. So we've given very few folks access so far.

We will have to think more about the ways we might be able to improve this.

arktis · 03-26-2024, 09:31 AM

Thank you for the consideration.
I understand that it is difficult to open the sources due to security issues. Then, at leats
- please organize the translation text files a bit more. It would be a great help, if you organize the texts into groups, e.g. texts written in the same page, texts cosisting a same artilce and etc.

I hope we could find better ways to improve translation system, and led more international players to play the game.

03-24-2024, 02:46 AM	#1
arktis Bat Boy Join Date: Mar 2024 Posts: 2	suggestions to translation Sehr geehrte Developers, I am a big fan of your games and played them since OOTP19. It has been a great experiences to play future and historical leagues and fictional leagues too. Sometimes, I enjoy watching fictional players surpassing existing records. This was one of the reasons why I was so happy to hear the news of the game being translated into Korean. I thought I could finally enjoy the ultimate baseball management game much easiser. So, I waited with patience though initial versions of translation had lots of errors - e.g. automatically translated family names which should not be translated and etc. Still, I see those errors and mistranslations while playing games. There are still mistranslated names (first names, last names, team names, nicknames, and school names), sentences with variables that are out of order, and mistranslated sentences due to the different phrase order between english and korean. I understand this situation, since there are too many texts to translate, those mistranslations, however, break immersion in the game. No one wants to read the baseball text which are not used in korean baseball and no one wants to be confused by wrong names. So, as one of the biggest fan of your OOTP series, I have reviewed the translation texts by myself since OOTP22, and shared them in korean Internet communities. At first, I only corrected link errors, occured due to differences in spacing between Korean and English. As I saw possibilities, I corrected more texts. I tried to correct the orders of korean sentences more natural, and also changed some expressions to expressions more frequently used in Korea. I also tried to keep unity of translation among terms. Those efforts, however, were thought to be sometimes largely meaningless, since there were some points which I could do nothing about. Because of the structural differences between Korean and English, some expressions parsed into uncomplete phrases cannot be translated properly. So, there are korean expressions like "...구장 뉴욕 양키스" (means 'the Ballpark of New York Yankies' but translated like 'New York Yankees Ballpark of ...') or "...보다 클 수 없습니다" (means 'must not be greater than' but translated like '... than must not be greater') and so on. I think I could understand how you build original english texts in game, and why original texts are segmented like this, but this make lots of errors in translations, and also large errors while reviewing the translation texts to be more natural. For these reasons, I really want to provide some suggestions to make future translation better: - open text generation module or translation module of the game. If you provide us these modules, I think there would a couple of players with coding abilities including me who really want to improve the quality of the tanslation. - or at least, build as many expressions as possible in sentences. This would make the translation much eaiser and more natural. Translators don't have to worry about the translation of texts like consist of only a-word prepositions or prepositional phrases. - or hire players who have played several years and understand the game, at least before the launch of new version. It would be a good help to improve the translations, since there are some translated texts which seems like that the former translator have not played the game. I watched interviews saying that there are only few people developing the game, so I do understand the difficulties you have been expereinced around years. That is why I am fully ready to help you make better games and make more players to play this game. I will continue to do my best to do what I can do on my position. I hope to hear from you soon. Thank you. mit herzlichen Grüßen Arktis

03-25-2024, 07:01 AM	#2
Lukas Berger OOTP Developments Join Date: Aug 2007 Location: Nice, Côte d'Azur, France Posts: 20,993	Hi, You make some very good suggestions! We will have to take a look at what we can do here in order to have some more folks help out with fixing and improving the translation. This is a difficult thing to set up, because anyone that has direct access to this needs to be highly trusted not to add inappropriate content here. So we've given very few folks access so far. We will have to think more about the ways we might be able to improve this. __________________ lukas@ootpdevelopments.com PreOrder Out of the Park Baseball 26! Need to upload files for us to check out? Instructions can be found here

03-26-2024, 09:31 AM	#3
arktis Bat Boy Join Date: Mar 2024 Posts: 2	Thank you for the consideration. I understand that it is difficult to open the sources due to security issues. Then, at leats - please organize the translation text files a bit more. It would be a great help, if you organize the texts into groups, e.g. texts written in the same page, texts cosisting a same artilce and etc. I hope we could find better ways to improve translation system, and led more international players to play the game.