News translation from English to other languages
Posted: 12 February 2017, 20:32
This news is mostly for translators from the community helping to translate Board Game Arena from English into so many languages (currently 34), but it may also interest other players who love to know how things work 
When we publish a new annoucement on our welcome page, we write it twice, once in English for everyone speaking English, and once in French, because since we are French, it looks like a thing we can and should do! So for English and French speaking players, that's the end of the story. But of course, since anyone in the world can access Board Game Arena through the internet, there is a lot of people interested in playing board games who don't necessarily speak English. That's why we made it possible to translate the website and games, and we have been amazed by the response of the community on this to allow such a large number of players to play in their native language.
The news, though, were not included in the system. For a long time, they were just in English for other languages (except French). That was unsatisfactory, because it made the welcome page linguistically heterogeneous (not pretty
) and because non English speaking players could not figure it out. So we made a change to use machine translation to translate the news in other languages. Of course this was not perfect, since translation is a difficult task that computers haven't mastered (yet). But it allowed to have a nicer welcome page using the same language everywhere, and players speaking only those languages could at least get an idea of what was going on.
Now, we have gone to the next step, and integrated this first machine translation into the same translation system as for the site and games. This means that any player understanding English can now help make the translations better in his/her native language!
So if you see that the computer really messed it up, now you can just fix it
You can access the translation interface by clicking on the "Improve translation" button on the "humans versus computer" translation progress bar above each news on the welcome page (including this one!). Changes are taken into account every hour, so translations can improve quickly to benefit the maximum number of readers.
For example, here is how the translation progress bar looks in Italian:
It was a frequent request from translators to be able to improve the news quality in other languages: we are really happy to provide this new functionnality and we hope that it will be appreciated by translators (who we would like to thank again for their help in making Board Game Arena more accessible and welcoming to such a large audience) and of course by readers!
When we publish a new annoucement on our welcome page, we write it twice, once in English for everyone speaking English, and once in French, because since we are French, it looks like a thing we can and should do! So for English and French speaking players, that's the end of the story. But of course, since anyone in the world can access Board Game Arena through the internet, there is a lot of people interested in playing board games who don't necessarily speak English. That's why we made it possible to translate the website and games, and we have been amazed by the response of the community on this to allow such a large number of players to play in their native language.
The news, though, were not included in the system. For a long time, they were just in English for other languages (except French). That was unsatisfactory, because it made the welcome page linguistically heterogeneous (not pretty
) and because non English speaking players could not figure it out. So we made a change to use machine translation to translate the news in other languages. Of course this was not perfect, since translation is a difficult task that computers haven't mastered (yet). But it allowed to have a nicer welcome page using the same language everywhere, and players speaking only those languages could at least get an idea of what was going on.Now, we have gone to the next step, and integrated this first machine translation into the same translation system as for the site and games. This means that any player understanding English can now help make the translations better in his/her native language!
So if you see that the computer really messed it up, now you can just fix it
You can access the translation interface by clicking on the "Improve translation" button on the "humans versus computer" translation progress bar above each news on the welcome page (including this one!). Changes are taken into account every hour, so translations can improve quickly to benefit the maximum number of readers.
For example, here is how the translation progress bar looks in Italian:
It was a frequent request from translators to be able to improve the news quality in other languages: we are really happy to provide this new functionnality and we hope that it will be appreciated by translators (who we would like to thank again for their help in making Board Game Arena more accessible and welcoming to such a large audience) and of course by readers!
