Board Game Arena

Good afternoon. Today, I want to vent with this text because I feel frustrated by what happened between yesterday and today. First of all, I know we are translating altruistically, but precisely because we are doing this work for free, the least we could expect is some acknowledgment for the effort made.

I don’t know how things are in other languages, but in Spain, translating games into Spanish is chaotic. There’s no cooperation except for some users, only competition. And often, those who compete add grammatical errors to comments that were previously translated correctly. You’re left in constant distress, reviewing daily because, even if you undo certain edits, they can easily come back 20 days later and re-edit your reversal.

I’ve gone off on a bit of a tangent, so let me get back to the main issue I wanted to address.

Yesterday, I translated nearly 13 full pages of the game Gamme Logic into Spanish. Today, I was surprised to find that those pages have disappeared because the same text has been re-added, but with code. Something like replacing "The monkey is on the left side" with "${char1} is on the left side." Imagine my face when, after spending time translating 13 pages, reviewing them, unifying terms, and more, I find that my work isn’t even acknowledged with bonuses in the form of points/rewards.

Given the competitiveness in the Spanish community, the appearance of these pages to translate has turned into chaos, with at least 4 translators working simultaneously. I tried to contribute my grain of sand again, only to see that not only were my choices from yesterday not respected, but each person, without reviewing, translated each repeated line as they saw fit.

In the end, after seeing all my work thrown away, I was forced to unify terms and lines so they would be consistent for the game.

I apologize for this long text, but I just needed to vent.

chibisake wrote: ↑04 March 2025, 21:19 Yesterday, I translated nearly 13 full pages of the game Gamme Logic into Spanish. Today, I was surprised to find that those pages have disappeared because the same text has been re-added, but with code. Something like replacing "The monkey is on the left side" with "${char1} is on the left side." Imagine my face when, after spending time translating 13 pages, reviewing them, unifying terms, and more, I find that my work isn’t even acknowledged with bonuses in the form of points/rewards.

Wow, 13 pages lost! I feel very sorry for you!

This is a well known problem, also discussed here https://boardgamearena.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=34551 and here https://boardgamearena.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=32685

You may vote for this bug report https://boardgamearena.com/bug?id=99816

cigma wrote: ↑04 March 2025, 23:56

chibisake wrote: ↑04 March 2025, 21:19 Yesterday, I translated nearly 13 full pages of the game Gamme Logic into Spanish. Today, I was surprised to find that those pages have disappeared because the same text has been re-added, but with code. Something like replacing "The monkey is on the left side" with "${char1} is on the left side." Imagine my face when, after spending time translating 13 pages, reviewing them, unifying terms, and more, I find that my work isn’t even acknowledged with bonuses in the form of points/rewards.

Wow, 13 pages lost! I feel very sorry for you!

This is a well known problem, also discussed here https://boardgamearena.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=34551 and here https://boardgamearena.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=32685

You may vote for this bug report https://boardgamearena.com/bug?id=99816

I can't believe it.... BGA removed all the 13 pages AGAIN, leaving only 4 pages.

I believe that it was not BGA, but the developer of that single game, that removed about 600 texts and replaced them with about just 200.

In the first version, the developer used a huge amount of single texts for each combination of two color/characters, in the current version they use placeholders for the colors/characters, so instead of 6x5 (=30) similar texts they have just 1 text with placeholders plus 6 text with the name of the colors/characters.

Using placeholders is in general a good idea (beside the disadvantage that translators can not be sure of the gender of the placeholder value, e.g. „the ${placeholder}“ can be „der/die/das ${placeholder}“ in German). Having 30 texts, where only the colors/characters are different, may lead to inconsistent translations, when different translator translate them.

The bad think here was, that the developer did not use placeholders directly from the start, but changed to them later on, when many volunteer translators already had translated 650 texts into many different languages.

We can’t change what happened, and I would not suggest to roll back to the first version without placeholders, but we should build awareness to developers that huge changes on texts after leaving alpha will cause big frustrations for volunteer translators. Developers should think about the used text and the usage of placeholders before opening their games to beta.

First version (example):
The Purple Bird is on the right of the Yellow Bird
The Purple Bird is on the right of the Pink Bird
The Purple Bird is on the right of the Green Bird
The Purple Bird is on the right of the Blue Bird
The Yellow Bird is on the right of the Purple Bird
The Yellow Bird is on the right of the Pink Bird
The Yellow Bird is on the right of the Green Bird
The Yellow Bird is on the right of the Blue Bird
The Pink Bird is on the right of the Purple Bird
The Pink Bird is on the right of the Yellow Bird
The Pink Bird is on the right of the Purple Bird
The Pink Bird is on the right of the Pink Bird
The Pink Bird is on the right of the Green Bird
… (plus same text for 20 other color combinations)

Current version:
The ${charA} is on the right of the ${charB}
Purple Bird
Yellow Bird
Pink Bird
Green Bird
Blue Bird

(and same with many other hints, like „ The ${charA} is not just on the right of the ${charB}“, „ The ${charA} is just on the right of the ${charB}“, …