Tervetuloa! (and more about translations)

[Een]

We are very happy to announce that Board Game Arena is now available in Finnish! Once again, a big thank you to all the wonderful translators who make it possible to enjoy board games together in so many languages! (Finnish is the 25th language to become available on BGA: wahoo!)

This is also an nice occasion to sum up the miscellaneous language-related functionnalities on BGA:

• the website and the games are collaboratively translated by the community. To contribute, go to the Translate Board Game Arena page (but please make sure to read our Translation guidelines beforehand). If a language is not available for translation, just ask us to open it in the Translations forum. Native English speakers can also contribute by fixing our mistakes in the English strings, as we are not native English speakers ourselves
• the community can also create rules summaries for games in any language. To do so, click on any game from the Games page, scroll to the "Rules summary" section, then click the "Edit it" link from the banner (or the "Edit" icon). This will redirect you to a wiki set up with the same language as the one that you use to browse BGA, and you can add to (or improve) its content. The help pages work the same way, so they can also be translated or improved in the wiki.
• the BGA news presented on the home page (such as this one), are machine-translated by default to be presented in your language. We know that this is far from perfect, but it allows to have a linguistically homogeneous home page, and to get the message through to people who don't understand English. If you prefer to read the news in English, you can click the "Show original" link in the top right corner of the news, or make it the default in your account preferences under "Board Game Arena news translation". In the future, we hope to enable community translations for the news system, but we are not there yet.
• during a game, chat messages from other players can be machine-translated by hovering over the message and clicking the icon (translation will be opened in a new browser tab). Again, this is far from perfect, but it may enable you to communicate with other players even though you don't share a common language, wich is pretty neat when you think about it: this was science-fiction not so long ago! Just keep in mind that sometimes the translation will be bogus, so you should take it with a grain of salt (especially if it seems discourteous or insulting: your chat partner might still be quite well intentioned: machine translation is notoriously bad at conveying feelings and nuances). On the whole, keeping your sentences simple is a good advice to get better results.
• finally, in the forum, messages are displayed as written by the user, but can be machine-translated in the language you use to browse the forum (which you can set in your forum control panel) with just one click on the "Translate" button in the top right corner of the post.

We hope that you enjoy browsing and playing on BGA in your own language, and again, a big thanks to all contributors!

[DoctorSink]

For a second, I thought we had a new game called Tervetuloa!

[nikos messis]

What about Time Machine and the new game?

[GriefWight]

Hey,

As a Finnish person I must say that the Finnish BGA front page is written in really really bad Finnish altogether. It seems like it was translated by Google Translate. Most of the text is actually pretty hard to interpret.

Example from "Tervetuloa! (and more about translations)": "We hope that you enjoy browsing and playing on BGA in your own language, and again, a big thanks to all contributors!"
Finnish translation at the moment...: "Toivomme, että nautitte selailu ja toistaa BGA omalla kielelläja tässäkin Iso kiitos Kaikki vastaajat!"
...which means in Finnish: "We hope that you enjoy browse and repeat BGA in own languageand here too a Big thanks All contributors!"

It's understandable, but certainly not written by a Finnish person.

[Trociu]

That's because news are the only thing translated by microsoft translator You can change it in settings to make it always appear in english.

[Een]

It seems like it was translated by Google Translate.

Yes, it's exactly what I explain under the third bullet about the news
(as well as the tradoffs accepted: this is only for the news; this is definitely not perfect, but useful for people not fluent in English; if you are fluent in English, you can deactivate it)

Cheers,
Een