I was scrolling through new releases and saw something that, as someone who translated media products in the past and is looking for work in the area, made my blood boil.
Be advised, rant below:
Devs who use crowdsourced community-based translations for their games are
1. Unprofessional as heck
2. Parasitic assholes
1. Unprofessional because translating a work of fiction is not a work of mere transposition of words into another language. It's a work of cultural adaptation -- you read all the text you have to work on, understand its meaning and its context and how it can be translated into your own language and for a different culture and only then you get to work, also trying to translate the same stuff in the same way and maintain a consistent style. These tools give you random lines to translate with no damn context, with no central figure to adapt all translations to common criteria and no check whatsoever. It's also much different from an organized team of fan-translators because the better ones share the same figures of professional teams. So, in resorting to these tools, you prove that you're an unprofessional hack and you have no idea of what you're doing.
2. Parasitic assholes because translations give a product a whole new audience the author can make money from, so you need to pay your damn translators. But of course, reality is hard and the indie scene is not an easy world so it's totally understandable that sometimes you have to resort to the good old "job for visibility" trade-off, which is terrible but often the only viable solution -- people translate your game in a professional way, either as solo freelancer or in an organized team, and you put them in the credits using their names and maybe you give them a little gift such as a copy of the game or some other cool thing as a thank you. Nothing of sorts with these crappy tools -- you get no money because 'of course we got no money', no visibility because 'of course not, you're not even a team and you can hop on and off whenever you want', not even a sweet kiss on the bottom just to say they appreciated your work. No, no, you're a cretin being exploited by assholes and hurting both yourself, your future and a whole category. And then maybe some of these devs also go on twitter and complain about how fucking unfair the job of indie developer is. FUUUUUCK YOU.
There, rant over. Bye.