English Translation suggestion

[Popetastic]

I understand that right now the whole game is translated into English and all that remains is to go through and meticulously check each and every word, signpost, loading screen, item details, tooltips, etc is showing up correctly in-game. While I've never done any kind of translating myself, I do understand that in a project like this the hardest part is the last ~5%. The reason is easily understood by anyone that's ever misplaced their keys and looked absolutely everywhere for them to no avail, only to find them later on laying in plain sight on the sofa. Once you check somewhere your brain files that away as checked and doesn't expect to see them there, so you don't, even if you're looking right at them.

There's some cool youtube videos about this, the most popular probably being the one where you're counting volleyballs so intently you don't see a gorilla walk clear across the stage. That's not exactly what this is about, though, and my post is dragging on already.

SO:

Your translation team can save a lot of painstaking and tedious work by enlisting the community. For the reasons above, it will probably be more effective overall as well as faster and more efficient. Uploading whatever version the translators are using and setting up a github or a wiki would allow users to flag bits of dialogue or tool-tip in a way that is easy for the translators to navigate through and fix. You can set up categories for untranslated, unclear, wonky sounding, buggy, text not matching the voice, or whatever else you're looking for. The translation team can easily look at that website, fix the problem, and then tag it as resolved. The testers don't even need to speak German at all because they wouldn't be doing the fixing themselves anyway.

Nehrim ended up with a few untranslated bits left in as I recall for what I imagine to be this reason: the translators looked at the German bit showing up in game but didn't actually see it because they had already flagged it in their minds as checked and resolved. The 99% of properly translated lines and the multiple fine tooth comb passes made it invisible to them.

Even if this suggestion doesn't cause the English version to come out faster I believe it would make it much easier (or possible, at least) to eventually reach a 100% bug and error free translation. Food for thought, I suppose.

tldr: a 100% perfect translation is very difficult to achieve due to the incredibly vast scope of this game. A translation team of a few people will struggle majorly due to the principal of selective attention (search youtube for "Monkey Business Illusion") To solve this issue, you could release the English translator team version to the public or simply a large group of people and create a github or wiki for any user to flag bits of dialogue or text that's untranslated. A translator can read the list, fix the problems, and then unflag it on the website. More eyes will catch more problems and catch them faster, making a perfect translation much easier to achieve much more quickly.