are the minecraft translations into obscure languages actually, like, good? bc it seems hard to proofread a crowdin project with >100 languages
@leo I feel like Minecraft is one of those things where the userbase is so huge and so dedicated that people would be obsessive enough to make it at least pretty good.
@gsuberland @leo there’s also not a lot of complex concepts to communicate. It’s almost all just factual labels describing a particular material.
@jon @leo usually the biggest restriction is the localisation support in the software itself. for example the software might expect you to provide a 1:1 translation for each English word and phrase, substituting words into phrases in a chosen position, but a lot of the time that results in awkward translations because there isn't support for altering the phrase to fit the specific word (particularly an issue with languages that have gendered words). there's a lot of skill in working around this.
@jon @leo so even if the concepts and terms themselves are pretty easy to translate in isolation, and the person writing the translation is a native speaker of both languages, you can still end up with a pretty meh translation because the localisation support was basic and whoever made the translation wasn't experienced with working around these specific problems.
it's why we need good translators for software, rather than just people who are good at speaking two languages! :)