http://paperspleaseloc.github.io/
Pretty brilliant...reading Pope's devlog for the game makes it clear that he's an excellent game developer and designer..but it's unexpected that he'd also know how to whip up a useful, well-designed web-app for the purposes of supporting his game like this.
Then again, even Papers Please is making common mistakes. I can count on a single finger the number of i18n jobs I have seen. One in many years of looking at IT jobs. This stuff is little understood, and very little demand. But he makes of pointing out how this will causes problems.
I would love to see this game in Arabic, for example. Number in Arabic is crazy complicated, and as a guy who translated software for FOSS (arabeyes.org) there is a reason I bring up the number logic (1, dual, 3-99, 1000+ dictate different noun classes) and POT handles that. This and many other issues indicate why no one can be bothered to handle this until much later, and then it is such a pain in the ass with non-English charsets.
Not that this issue has come up a lot on HN recently. I am glad people are showing this stuff with interest. Regardless of my opinion, this is very cool work and I am glad to see developers caring again.
CSV is common because there are many more applications that can read/write it, it's relatively standard, and translation data tends to be vaguely relational.
FWIW, playing Papers Please, you can easily come to the same conclusion. The game is a great game.
They also just released a really neat Javascript tool which makes translating web content super easy. You just embed some JS in your template, and it re-writes the pages in translation when needed. Way way easier than, for example, setting up a multilingual Drupal site, and in most cases, will get the job done nicely.
My $0.02
Why do people feel the need to write this after their posts? Were you afraid it would not be clear that it was an opinion? What purpose does it serve? Why did you go to such length to write it as "My $0.02" rather than "My two cents", or just "My 2c"?
It seems to be some kind of "thing" that people do here. Is it an in-joke?
the user of the phrase hopes to lessen the impact of a
possibly contentious statement, showing politeness and
humility.And the US is about the only country in the world where MDY order for date parts is used exclusively. I wouldn't call the US and Belize »many countries« ;-)
> There’s a system for making people sound generally non-Japanese (using lots of katakana and dropping prepositions), but it’s tiring to read and has an air of childishness, since this is one of the first scripts kids learn to read/write in Japan
This is utterly wrong. Katakana usage in Japanese has nothing childish attached to it. If at all, Hiragana would be the one which is considered the more "childish" way of writing, but there are numerous imported words (and more and more, I'd say) using Katakana even in business context - and certainly taken very seriously.
If you don't know a language, don't make assumptions on it. By the way the french translation of "Your son is dead" as "Votre fils est mort" is very dry and tasteless, the proper way or saying it in french is "votre fils est decede". I hate it when people do a literate translation from English to French, many words are similar but they are not used at all in the same situations.
That's exactly the point. You wouldn't really say it like this in English either, but in a Soviet style totalitarian state, it's easy to see.
Yes, this is why most people generally hate doing translations in general - people like you who nitpick.
I don't know a bit of French, or Japanese. But I do know that there are a awful lot of English translations, done by well-meaning people, which vary from mediocre to Godawful. Almost every anime subtitling job I've ever seen is at the very least somewhat stilted and awkward to my ear. (Though they're still better than the dubs.) And a lot of it comes down to native English speakers who fear losing the intended nuances of the original and so do a rigidly literal translation, because they think that's the "most accurate."
So the problem isn't nitpicking; it's the wrong kind of nitpicking. If you think you can do a translation by following a rulebook and wave off dissenters as "nitpickers," you are probably going to do a shitty job, and have no idea why.
It's not nitpicking, if there are 50 000+ words in the common language there's a reason for it.
mort = dead
You don't have to hate
In translations you'll often get situations where A should be translated to B' in that context (even if in the original language B wouldn't be used there), in order to transfer the concept properly. Literal translations often end up weird, and sometimes completely wrong.