Board Game Arena

Situation:
Currently, we only have the Portuguese language, but no Portuguese (Portugal) nor Portuguese (Brazil) as is commonly seen in many applications.

My suggestion:
Make an exact copy of the actual translation to both pt_PT and pt_BR, then the community can edit over their respective translations.

Reason:
I think that keeping a single translation for both languages might be prejudicial for BGA. The translation often feel awkward and gives the feeling of "weak translation" or "the site doesn't care about making a proper translation". It gives an amateur feeling for the website. Since BGA grew a lot over the years, I think it's about time to separate translations. I would gladly do some translations for pt_BR, but as of now I don't see the point if the translations will always look bad.

Problem:
One problem I find is: If one translation is left alone while the community only edits the other one.
My counter points:
1-Site grew and has a larger community so this might not be an issue.
2-If someone really cared about the translation they could do it by themselves, if the translation is left untouched it probably means that part of the community doesn't care much about the translations.

This could be done. It would lead to the same situation as traditional Chinese and simplified Chinese.
Though,

• when it was discussed previously in the forums there seemed to be an agreement that pt_PT and pt_BR are close enough that an acceptable consensus could be reached by translators;
• audience from Portugal is small in comparison to audience from Brazil so there is a risk that pt_PT would not be maintained.

Could you make it a suggestion in our tracker https://boardgamearena.com/bugs, post the link in this thread, and see if it gains some support?

I updated my previous report including a link to this thread.
This is the link to the report: https://boardgamearena.com/bug?id=29867

So, I was born in PT but lived in BR for 7 years and my wife is also from BR. I am also fluent in English (learned it from age 6) and Spanish (lived and worked there for many years). Can speak French and live in Germany for 2 years now. All this to justify my opinion...

Even tho there are some differences in pt_PT and pt_BR there is an unification of both languages signed by a treaty made between all PALOPs (Portuguese Official Language Countries).

So, my opinion is that only one PT should be use and the translators should be aware of this when making translations, not using terms that are specific for any of the countries, making an effort to use words that are common to all PALOPs.

We only have the one type of English despite this being spoken in many countries. Portuguese is only spoken in a handful of countries, mostly just Brazil and Portugal. Surely it's possible to find a way to make translations that make sense in both forms of the language.

Giordano Bruno 1974 wrote: ↑25 December 2020, 00:50 We only have the one type of English despite this being spoken in many countries. Portuguese is only spoken in a handful of countries, mostly just Brazil and Portugal. Surely it's possible to find a way to make translations that make sense in both forms of the language.

I'm not sure where I stand on the issue, to be honest, but there could be several factors that make the reading experience smoother in English. It may be that English speakers in general are familiar enough with American English. There may be differences that are more pronounced and harder to avoid in Portuguese. Also, many games have well-documented rules in English that have already gone through proofreading outside of BGA.

Perhaps it's not so much a question of "is there a translation that works for both" but "can the volunteer translators find it".

I have the site set to English, so I don't know how pervasive this is, but when I tried to help with translations I found myself wondering "is this google-translate, pt-pt, something else?" a lot while looking at the existing samples.

The previous discussion mentioned above is here https://boardgamearena.com/forum/viewto ... 53&lang=en
It's from 2012, when the Portuguese translation was first opened.

It's time to support both versions of Portuguese.

There's no burden and almost no work for BGA; simply duplicate it and let the community fix the errors.

After seeing so many "errors" in my Portuguese, I ended up opting to use English, since I'm not a native English speaker and in this case I don't have the impression of using a poorly translated website.