Hello all,
I am preparing to start the next CC development cycle, and a question has arisen. We have received several requests to translate CC. Some people have suggested crowd-sourced translation, and some have been offers to provide translations for payment.
The situation is:
- We cannot afford to pay for translations from CC's revenue stream, so that route is out.
- We cannot even give copies of CC to translators because Google Play requires that the produce be sold at the public price. The only thing we can offer a translator is a public thank you.
- It will take a fair amount of work even to prepare for translatability.
- We will need to choose a tool and a testing method, neither of which exist today.
- There is no way we can evaluate the quality or correctness of most translations. I am not convinced that this is a serious problem, but it could be.
Give the above, crowd-sourcing is really the only possibility we can consider.
My question: given the constraints, is there enough interest in doing translations to justify the non-trivial amount of work to prepare for them? Are any of you people out there willing and able to do translations?
FYI: the work in preparing for translations is going through the app and finding all text, then analyzing that text for linguistic traps such as words expressing quantity, present and past tense, and word order. I am talking about things like "read" which in English is both past and present tense, words like "series" which is both singular and plural, adjective/adverb order such as "blue train" in English but "train bleu" in French, and verb number such as "I read", "He reads", and "they read" in English but something rather different in other languages. I have no idea what preparing for translation to a right-to-left language would entail.