Respect to GoA

[Alan]

Regarding translations of MMORPGS :-

http://eqiiforums.station.sony.com/eq2/board/message?board.id=Newbie&message.id=10339

Looks like SoE dropped the ball on the translation a few complains from our Euro friends, makes you realise what a good job GoA actualy do.

And on UK launch day of EQ2 (thats today) the servers came down at 11.00am for maintenance and will be down until around 15:00 pretty damn clever to plan maintenance for the UK prefered server during the daytime when many have taken time off work to play (fortunatly not me heheh)

so.. /salute to GoA not sure of many other mmorpgs that translate the game, but seems GoA are way ahead of the rest.

 

[Nive11en]

Well, the do have a few years of translation practice now

Didn't know EQ2 was launching already heh - can't understand how its possible to mess up with the translation, must have hired somebody really irresponsible. They should have hired native speakers to check that its right, guess they did not.

 

[Revz]

If it was a choice between simultaneous launches and patching, in game support and being able to play on any server worldwide versus getting better translations I know which one I would rather pick.

 

[Driwen]

If it was a choice between simultaneous launches and patching, in game support and being able to play on any server worldwide versus getting better translations I know which one I would rather pick.

it seems that the translations are similar to babelfish translations (well a bit better and just judging from that thread). So basically, unless you play on english servers, you will have a hard time understanding the npc's.

 

[Frosen]

Lol aye they mixed it up a bit, not only is halve the game in english/french you gotta download an hour or more just to be able to connect to the bugged french game/server
But it was good enough to make me and my gf lauch a good while rofl
Might connect to the german servers just to hear them npc's speak ze german language

 

[Flimgoblin]

If it was a choice between simultaneous launches and patching, in game support and being able to play on any server worldwide versus getting better translations I know which one I would rather pick.

well given you don't get translated for that's really not surprising

If it was a german game and got translated into babelfish english then you'd probably feel very differently.

 

[Milne]

Shhhhh! Stop encouraging GOA!

 

[Icebreaker]

You should check out the German Servers. The Translations aren't finished there. You get a mix of English and German Text almost everywhere. xD

Example:

You schlägt den <Mobname> for 123 Schaden.

................

 

[Archeon]

I'm not sure <Mobnames> need translations, atleast i'm fairly sure there's no German word for 'Cetus'

 

[Draylor]

GOAs translations are far from perfect and ontop of that they take an incredibly long time. Few French/German server players come here, so you wouldnt see their comments on translation quality.

As for EQ2 servers being down: hardly surprising. Virtually every MMORPG launch has problems in the first days/weeks. EQ2 will likely have more than most due to the very short beta phase it had.

If it was a german game and got translated into babelfish english then you'd probably feel very differently.

Wouldnt be the first time we'd been treated to Babelfish'd Friday news so .....

 

[IainC]

GOAs translations are far from perfect and ontop of that they take an incredibly long time. Few French/German server players come here, so you wouldnt see their comments on translation quality.

As for EQ2 servers being down: hardly surprising. Virtually every MMORPG launch has problems in the first days/weeks. EQ2 will likely have more than most due to the very short beta phase it had.

Wouldnt be the first time we'd been treated to Babelfish'd Friday news so .....

Our translations of patches are usually done fairly quickly. Certainly the teams we have work very efficiently. Obviously the length of time taken is dependant on the size of the patch and the amount of text to be translated however testing of translated files usually begins very soon after we recieve them from Mythic. I'm not sure how you come to the conclusion that our translations take a long time as, last I checked we don't make our project worksheets public. Perhaps you mean that 'It takes a long time to get a translated patch live' which is an entirely differnt thing to 'taking a long time to translate' as it takes into account such time consuming activities as testing, fixing bugs, testing fixes, working with Mythic on problems etc.

The Friday News (in fact most of the English news) is translated from the French by translators who aren't native English speakers and then (unless I'm not in on that day) proofread by me (who is a native English speaker).
Most of the translation problems are to do with words that are similar in both languages but have different shades of meaning, or with literal translations of sentence structure. Because French uses more words than English does to say the same thing, some of the 'excess' words get shoehorned into the English translation. I usually prune it to read as better English however.

Finally, if you do come across a translation error then report it via RightNow. We can usually fix mis-translations quickly as they are one of the elements that we can change without reference to Mythic.

 

[Camillo]

I've been both in daoc & eq2 closed beta (native german speaker here) and I can tell you that SOE's lightyears ahead, compared to GOAs daoc translations when Daoc started.

Tried Goa's german servers on first days of retail, 30% of game text & mobs, including kill-task decriptions, were french (on german server!), they even managed to mix up language files.

 

[Cyfr]

The Friday News (in fact most of the English news) is translated from the French by translators who aren't native English speakers and then (unless I'm not in on that day) proofread by me (who is a native English speaker).

*ehem.. i'm just being pedantic I guess *

 

[Falcon]

Our translations of patches are usually done fairly quickly. Certainly the teams we have work very efficiently. Obviously the length of time taken is dependant on the size of the patch and the amount of text to be translated however testing of translated files usually begins very soon after we recieve them from Mythic. I'm not sure how you come to the conclusion that our translations take a long time as, last I checked we don't make our project worksheets public. Perhaps you mean that 'It takes a long time to get a translated patch live' which is an entirely differnt thing to 'taking a long time to translate' as it takes into account such time consuming activities as testing, fixing bugs, testing fixes, working with Mythic on problems etc.

The Friday News (in fact most of the English news) is translated from the French by translators who aren't native English speakers and then (unless I'm not in on that day) proofread by me (who is a native English speaker).
Most of the translation problems are to do with words that are similar in both languages but have different shades of meaning, or with literal translations of sentence structure. Because French uses more words than English does to say the same thing, some of the 'excess' words get shoehorned into the English translation. I usually prune it to read as better English however.

Finally, if you do come across a translation error then report it via RightNow. We can usually fix mis-translations quickly as they are one of the elements that we can change without reference to Mythic.

I think most people's question is why does it take so long for GOA to patch? The US version works fine so where do these bugs come from if you're merely translating strings of text? The question most people want answered from what I can tell, is why do these bugs that need fixing crop up in the first place, when modifying game content is something GOA shouldn't do unless they're doing GOA-only quests. Is it these quests that GOA do that cause the problems?

Perhaps it's just that the strings that require translating are embedded rather too deeply into the DAoC server source, but I find it hard to beleive that there isn't a decent amount of seperation between application and content, despite popular beleif, Mythic have some pretty decent team members like Scott Jennings. So am I just wrong in beleiving Mythic are competent enough to seperate content and application or are GOA just meddling where they shouldn't to cause these extra bugs that creep in?

 

[Draylor]

I'm not sure how you come to the conclusion that our translations take a long time

Yeah, sorry, you knew what I meant. Its impossible for us to tell whether delays are down to Mythic or GOA. Im sure its often Mythic's fault, but since your unable (for obvious reasons) to tell us that its GOA we have to blame for it

The fact that expansions (with obviously far more content than a typical patch to translate) are delayed by no longer than a typical patch compared to the time they arrive on US servers pretty much proves your point that its not the translation time

Exactly why patches take so long will have to remain a mystery

The Friday News

The incident Im referring to was a long time ago. Before FH forums, shortly after the GOA forums were shutdown and we moved to BW. For whatever reason the English news was unavailable that day, but French/German versions were up. Someone ran the German (or was it French) version through Babelfish and posted it.

A few hours later it appeared on the GOA site - complete with the grammatical errors you expect from Babelfish. The only difference was a quick search and replace to correct the translation of 'server' which babelfish translated to 'waiter'. Its certainly before you started posting on these forums: whether or not you were involved in proofreading at that stage I cant say.

Im sure others remember the incident Im referring to: was amusing but harmless

 

[IainC]

I think most people's question is why does it take so long for GOA to patch? The US version works fine so where do these bugs come from if you're merely translating strings of text? The question most people want answered from what I can tell, is why do these bugs that need fixing crop up in the first place, when modifying game content is something GOA shouldn't do unless they're doing GOA-only quests. Is it these quests that GOA do that cause the problems?

Perhaps it's just that the strings that require translating are embedded rather too deeply into the DAoC server source, but I find it hard to beleive that there isn't a decent amount of seperation between application and content, despite popular beleif, Mythic have some pretty decent team members like Scott Jennings. So am I just wrong in beleiving Mythic are competent enough to seperate content and application or are GOA just meddling where they shouldn't to cause these extra bugs that creep in?

The version of DAoC that Mythic run in the US (ignoring differences in patch version) is different to the international version which we run here in Europe. Goa content is nothing more than additional database slots which, in the main don't inter-relate to any other live content. As well as translating the text into German and French, we have to translate the code for our server configuration and for the different code-base that we are working with. We aren't merely translating strings of text, if that were the case we'd be patching no more than a week or so after the US.

 

[Ning]

I was in the french EQ2 beta test. I must say the translation wasn't really bad (espacially the VoiceOver was really well translated). The problem was that the translatation wasn't fully completed and so you could get the beginning of a quest in french and the end of the quest in english. But the parts translated were well translated. About 75% of the game was translated.
It reminds me that there was exactly the same problem with DAOC at the early begining in Feb 2002 and GOA gave 2 extra free weeks while they were finishing the translation.
GOA's DAOC translation is very good IMO. It follows the background of the game. For example the "Inconnu" is translated into "Prête d'Arrawn" (Arrawn Priest). A bad translation would have kept the original name ("Inconnu" is a french word that litteraly mean "Unknown").
Runemaster is translated in "Prêtre d'Odin" (Odin's Priest). I think it's more RPG oriented than "Runemaster".

 

[Draylor]

we have to translate the code for our server configuration

Have to ask the obvious questions, although Im not sure its possible for you to answer.

1. Why is server configuration different?
2. Why does this have to be done in a time consuming manner every time? After so many patches it seems like any 'conversion' should either be automated or completely reusable by this stage.

 

[IainC]

Have to ask the obvious questions, although Im not sure its possible for you to answer.

1. Why is server configuration different?
2. Why does this have to be done in a time consuming manner every time? After so many patches it seems like any 'conversion' should either be automated or completely reusable by this stage.

1: Because our hardware is different to the US hardware. I'm not a server tech so I can't be specific or go into techy detail about the exact changes that have to be made to code to get it to run on our servers.
2: It probably is. I have nothing to do with coding, other than for writing events and I don't have anything whatsoever to do with patch migration so I can't tell you how it's done. Our hardware is regularly upgraded so that may cause a problem with automated conversion scripts (as I said before I don't have any experience or knowledge in this area so I don't know for sure), however 30-odd patches down the line and I'd be astonished if the donkey work hadn't been streamlined by script tools and the like.

Finally this is just one of the things that have to be done to get a patch working and bug-free (or at least bug-light). The text and code translation is also a major endeavour as is testing, working with Mythic on fixes, testing the fixes, working with Mythic on fixing the problems that the last fixes created and so on...

 

[Ghostly]

Have to ask the obvious questions, although Im not sure its possible for you to answer.

1. Why is server configuration different?
2. Why does this have to be done in a time consuming manner every time? After so many patches it seems like any 'conversion' should either be automated or completely reusable by this stage.

wild guess:

1. Zone x, y and z run on mythic server 1, while zone x, y and z run on Goa server 1, 3 and 6 prolly due to diffrent hardware speccs and available servers and GOA's need to (I think) completely separate the different languages

2. I dont think mythic develops patches or expansions with GOA in mind but gears em entirely to their own (dynamic) specs/needs

edit, bah requiel beat me

 

[Draylor]

30-odd patches down the line and I'd be astonished if the donkey work hadn't been streamlined by script tools and the like.

Well yeah, thats why I asked - since its continually one of the major reasons given.

Anyway cheers for taking the time to answer

 

[[GOA]Erivoss]

It takes a long time because there's a lot to test. 12 different clients and 3 different server versions.

 

[Draylor]

Obvious, but true

I blame Mythic

 

[Cyfr]

Cause goa run Pentium Celerons and goa run Xeons

 

[Draylor]

Any time its been detailed GOAs servers have been higher spec than Mythics. I think

 

[scorge]

DAOC runs on a slighly modified version of BSD, am not sure how much the euro version differs from the US version that mythic use to run thier clusters

 

[Draylor]

BSD? Only article Ive seen detailing OS said it was Linux

 

[Skaven]

Requiel or whoever may answer this - any chance of getting a similar ''letters'' friday news similar to the Fridays grab bag on mythics Herald? I appreciate this may mean more workload for someone, but this may take some of the workload off rightnow increasing responce times? Not that I have a problem with responce times, just an idea.

 

[scorge]

BSD? Only article Ive seen detailing OS said it was Linux

there was an article a while ago about how mythic ordered 38 new servers to run a modified version of BSD for there gaming platform.

(the new servers were for catacombs)

will try and find the link

 

[Draylor]

Well if you care thats the article I was referring to. It is truly ancient though: written just after original US release