Secrets of Far Seas 2 - English Translation Project

[carmenara]

Dear Pirates,

I, Carmen of some small, evil nation far from Western civilisation, hereby undertake to provide any and all Russian to English translations required for quests and dialogues to allow for a synchronised Russian and English release early next year.

This opportunity has been granted by Dimitry "SeadogX" yesterday, originating from discussions herein.

Terms and conditions of service:

1. I shall serve as editor and translator in order to maximise rapid production capability, and decrease manpower requirements. Centralisation will allow me to complete the entire project, as planned by myself, before Christmas pending real life professional situation. It is also critical that there be NO competition for translation contracts as we cannot easily decide whose translation is "better", leading to severe complications and QC issues in the finished product.

2. I undertake NOT to alter any aspect of SoFS creative content and any rewording, summarisation, or any other language alterations shall be on the interest of providing authentic, novelised English translations.

3. Should any alteration be required from the Russian script, then a draft proposal shall be written in English and the changes proposed SEPARATE from the translation project which must proceed unhindered.

4. I will also seek to engage targets of opportunity, designing additional side quests and adding technical detail to the English side of the game.

5. I will only supply the mod team COMPLETE and ERROR-FREE documents as though it were a professional commitment.

6. I may, from time to time, post quest ideas and/or suggestions for dialogues (i.e., should we word it in modern English, or "pirate speak"?) in this forum, and provide a developer's blog such that official checks and balances may be implemented as necessary. It is important to note that the Russians, and not me, retain operational command and control.

With this note, I intend to start the translation operation later tonight once I've finished with the Build 14 movie "Battle for Liberty".

Once again Dimitry, thank you for this great opportunity to cooperate on an international scale!

 

[SeadogX]

Summing it all up - and may the Force be with us!

 

[Thomas the Terror]

Cool! Good job Snow White Sorrow, this way we western people also get some goodies from the Russian Secret of the Far Seas

 

[Pieter Boelen]

Sounds good. What about a joint translation effort though?
Assign different people to translate different files?
I think otherwise the project might be a bit too huge for one person to take care of.
Especially before Christmas.

Oh... and don't forget about the Build 14 manual completely, eh?

But in any case, good luck on your endeavours!

 

[carmenara]

You are correct, there are literally zillions of cyrillic characters I am facing. It's like taking on the whole Russian Army in winter!

But actually, translation is very, very fast.

What takes time is generating nice simple English to make sense (for our part of the world) of the literal translations. It's not difficult at all for me, I used to teach my Portuguese sisters the universal language, and the locals where I live benefit from my instruction by example as well, but just takes time!

Thank you for the support.

 

[Pieter Boelen]

You are correct, there are literally zillions of cyrillic characters I am facing. It's like taking on the whole Russian Army in winter!

And we all know how that one turned out on first try!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_invasion_of_Russia

 

[carmenara]

I am currently in the middle of my first assignment, which involves Peter Blake's acquaintance with a private detective and his wife.

12,000 words.

As I translate Cyrillic into our language I realise that this is no half past 6 commercial product but an in-depth study into various characters' conduct and even psychology. Sure, it is a linear quest I'm writing but do you get 12,000 words out of even massive projects like Fallout 3 and Morrowind? Well for Fallout I can say it's more like 12,000 words for the entire game, and this novella spans just one quest!

It plays out like one of those book-based roleplaying games, really, and I find great entertainment in slogging through the massive Russian Army of text!

No one in sane mind would do this alone, for sure, but my solitude in this makes it merrier for I can freely immerse myself in the amazing stories from Russia... it's just like reading the Arabian Nights for the first time...

 

[SeadogX]

It's only a tiny part of what we will offer you in the final release of the game, guys.

 

[carmenara]

I had a surprising amount of time to work on this in the office today, so its a few thousand words down and another hundred thousand to go...

I will take a break for now; blood sugar's gone pretty low...

 

[carmenara]

This project has been terminated for the following reasons:

1. It was critical for me to go full out on WBT (realistic ship handling) for POTC: NH, due to community interest. At the same time, a prototype "marketing" campaign for this website was devised in the form of regular blog articles by Thagarr and myself; the increased traffic from our discussions would no doubt benefit ALL the projects featured in these forums.

As a result, I decided to delay the translation project, as SoFS will not be released -now-, but NH needs a boost in popularity as well as can easily benefit from a few weeks devising a realism-based ship handling feature.

2. Both WBT, and our blogging project can be regarded as a tactical victory, both achieving their objectives at little cost and effort once the groundwork was laid and rapport was attained with other members of the community.

3. The aforesaid rapport was never generated in my limited time with SoFS, for the following reasons:

i. Too much attention from my "employer" in this case was focused on my personal details, to the point of infringements of privacy. As I regard myself a person with moral standards (you may disagree as you see fit), I can, will and have diverted resources away from this project as a penalty.

ii. No professional support; in fact the quality of my work was questioned a hundred times even though I demonstrated my initial concepts time and time again, to act in the best interests of the original quest writers and to produce a quality, novel-quality translation, not some junk from Babelfish that finds its way, ironically, to many commercial projects.

iii. It was suggested that I follow exactly the literal translation from Russian to English, in which case the product would be, sorry to say, complete and utter garbage to an English speaker.

You obviously cannot translate Ich wohne essen Frustuck into I want eat Breakfast! I have pride in my work, and it shows in my other projects, namely, WBT, the New Horizons manual, and the many intellectual studies on the http://piratesahoy.net news page. I expect attention be paid to those accomplishments, as again, everyone benefits from increased traffic to this site.

4. The last straw came today when I was accused with the following

[modified quote]

"You should have known better than to say you can complete everything by Christmas"

Actually, I can, I simply decided not to.

The reasons, again:

i. The English community here offered not only their support, appreciated my work, but also did a lot of fact-finding and gave me tons of real-world data to be able to successfully commence the WBT ship handling review project, and the manual which although far from complete, is huge. My rights were respected, and in certain cases, utter strangers had moved to protect my interests and offer valuable moral support (that's you Thagarr).

ii. In conversation with my "employers", it was hinted that there is "no rush" in the release of SoFS.

I thus engaged a target of opportunity to give a boost to the fledgling NH community by demonstrating, I hope, that it is possible to run low cost, high yield mini projects in a very short period of time even when no modding capability is available in the winter.

Fair warning was given, in the form of my signature post, the high activity in the NH forums, and from the news posts and various other constructive discussions in this forum.

5. Confronted with the above situation, I hereby declare that with immediate effect, the translation project shall be ceased, and would give fair warning that if others would take up similar work in a voluntary capacity, we should reference the real life mantra of "No money, no work."

Here, we don't talk about money, but suffice to say if I'm going to spend a couple thousand hours of my own time to build new possibilities and act also as an advertising agent for someone elses' project, I deserve a bit more respect.

6. Still questioning my "war won by Christmas" logic?

I made a manual from scratch in a week, and not only that, revamped POTC's ship handling from arcade to quasi-realistic, with full historical and real life hydrodynamics references... from 21 to 27 December. That's 6 days for 6 years of progress. Oh and do you notice it comes with a manual too? The as yet incomplete v0.3 release targeted for New Year contains over 70 ships. Many of them with hand-tuned "personalities" unique from similar vessels.

7. Any response in bad faith to the above shall constitute contempt against my desire to contribute to an environment based on freedom of thought and expression, for that is exactly what I hope in response to my trying my very best to lay out the entire situation in plain, objective English. An understanding, nothing more.

In the real world we talk about "corporate social responsibility", how the actions of a given business can affect its consumers through its everyday operations.

In here, we have to talk about supporting those people who give up countless hours and give said time and effort up on a strictly voluntary basis.

Not go "okay, you do everything", and the next moment "you get this done by X date" and when the reality of the situation is explained: "Your fault, not mine".

 

[Pieter Boelen]

*shakes head*
What can I say?

 

[Thomas the Terror]

Why are you suprised they wanted to know alot about you, the are all Comrades! So they thought you were too, and you HAVE to know what a Comrade does in his/her spare time!

I did some freelance texturing for their last project, never had any troubles with privacy infringement :S

 

[SeadogX]

Greetings, dear PiratesAhoy! gentlemen.

We are BGTeam and this is a joint declaration to you, gentlemen.

First of all, we want to say that each of us feel very sad and disappointed at this situation. The relations between our communities have been very good since our first contact and we are very sorry that those relations are in danger at this point. We appreciate those relations and we hope they will improve and develop, and never go bad. We do believe that there is the same relation to us at PiratesAhoy! community. It’s very odd and wrong if some stupid misunderstanding may spoil the experience we have been achieving in united since the beginning of our contact.

We have our personal opinion on the post that dear Snow White Sorrow have given to you. It’s actually a very strange message with some boorish and ungrounded criticism. Though it’s a very unpleasant message, as it have already been said, we are not to continue the controversy as there is neither sense, nor future in it. We are no lawyers or politicians or that sort of thing, we are just game fans who create their own games, and there is no logic in arguing with a born orator.

The project of the translation SoFS2 into English has been to develop the relations between our communities. And since it’s not completed, the work is to be continued. We are going to translate and to release the first English build of the game without assistance, if necessary, though we are still glad to take any help you can suggest. Anyway - the first build of SoFS2 in English will be released and it is a decided question.
Summing it all up, we’d like to wish you good luck, patience and better understanding between people in the coming year – it is necessary, as we believe.
Happy New Year, dear western pirates!

Sincerely your, BGTeam.


P.S. There is also a personal request from me - let's not to argue in this topic anymore. We've already said everything we wanted to say. I hope dear moderators will cope with this situation.

Why are you suprised they wanted to know alot about you, the are all Comrades! So they thought you were too, and you HAVE to know what a Comrade does in his/her spare time!

That was nice humour, mr. Bourgeois

 

[carmenara]

It's actually a very strange message with some boorish and ungrounded criticism. Though it's a very unpleasant message, as it have already been said, we are not to continue the controversy as there is neither sense, nor future in it. We are no lawyers or politicians or that sort of thing, we are just game fans who create their own games, and there is no logic in arguing with a born orator.

The born orator in this case is no other than yourself, who has evidently failed to generate any constructive discussion on the forum (which will secure crucial public interest) until something "interesting" happens. Now that there is controversy and blackmail in the equation, there will be public interest and so things can proceed better than planned.

Now don't use this opportunity to make excuses to cover yourself - my expectation is seeing exactly such commentary from you, on the forums, right from the beginning of December. The only way a project or sub-project is to be successful is to run a public dialogue. Apparently you don't need to be a born orator to do that. Any 13 year old girl can run a viral marketing op by her lonesome.

Instead, I, of all people, had to attempt all by my lonesome to document it, hence this thread, and proceed on the work without support.

That constitutes an operational error on your part, not mine, and so long as you're not getting cracking on the English translation or other parts of the mod, you're wasting your time.

 

[Pieter Boelen]

Since it is around my own bedtime, it is not the time for me to write any big documents here.

I do want to make clear that I do not wish for any bad relations with the BGTeam.
However, Snow White Sorrow's input in our community has also been much appreciated and hopefully will remain to be so for a long time to come.

Events took a wrong turn, though I believe not intentional on the part of any of the involved people.
I am surprised and very sorry to see what happened here and I think it would be best to forgive and forget in this instance.

On this forum, people of different backgrounds, nationalities and cultures have always been treated with the same respect
and I see no reason why it should be any different in dealing between two different communities.
We shall do our utmost to respect all members of the BGTeam
and hopefully the BGTeam members will be able to treat our members in similar fashion.

I do agree that more dialogue between our communities, about who we are and what we want would be beneficial to both parties.
Cooperation is best achieved in mutual dialogue where we all try to work towards a common goal.

 

[carmenara]

Not submitting to my personal feelings on the matter, Pieter's intervention in this case is much appreciated. Not only do I have a sizable portion of work done in this project, and don't wish to see it wasted, I also believe that the underlying problems in this scenario can be easily solved.

I work with Pieter a lot on Build 14's minor projects. For the record, we don't see eye to eye. At all. He has his views on life, I have mine.

We still throw completed work out the door on a regular basis and keep each other entertained in doing so.

All that's needed is a bit of professional courtesy. We don't make fun of each other when disagreements occur.

We solve them by setting even higher goals for the next stage of our work.

 

[Pieter Boelen]

I work with Pieter a lot on Build 14's minor projects. For the record, we don't see eye to eye. At all. He has his views on life, I have mine.

I wouldn't go quite that far. We don't agree on everything, but then it would be unnatural if we did.
After all, you're not me and I'm not you. But I do appreciate the work you do for us and as such, you deserve my respect.
And as long as we do have the same goal in mind, our differences don't matter that much anymore.

 

[Pieter Boelen]

Let us close this thread.