EU: Czech portal fail (and other issues)

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“I got 99 problems and the portal quality sure is one”

Hello everyone,

I actually thought for quite some time whether to make a post on it or not, but it’s pretty much a widely recognized problem. Let’s start with a bit of a background.

Lots of you fine folks reading FTR have probably asked yourself at one point: “Why does a random guy do this, when WG could simply hire an employee to do the translations of developer staff, post more historical articles and such?”

There are two answers for that – or, rather, one answer and two parts. First is “accountability” (simply put, the fact that when I screw up a translation, I can say sorry, fix it and nothing happens, when a WG employee screws it up, it’s like spreading false info), but this is not relevant to this article, we are going to talk about the second more.

The second answer is that for some reason, Wargaming wants all the national portals (sections) to have the same info at the same time, so everything that gets posted in English HAS to get posted in other languages. This by itself is IMHO pretty stupid (community people do a great job at translation, for example Raguel’s and Stormshadow’s German translation thread, the French QA thread and more), but whatever.

The real problem starts, when you hire incompetent people or externists, who have absolutely no clue, to translate the news into national languages and to manage the portal.

I am now talking specifically about the Czech portal. Ask on Czech subforums – ask anyone, they will tell you that the Czech portal is full of fail and rarely an article goes without some silly mistranslation or incorrect information. A few examples.

A gift shop Early October offer in Czech seems to be missing some parts (the 30 days premium, later it was fixed):

f8wt

Looks like the Czechs are going to get a new tier 10 tank destroyer:

fail1

Mid October Gift Shop offer had wrong description under the T-34-3 tank (someone just copied the 112 one under it), this was fixed later, but this post refers to it.

Or, some info is released too early, because Czech WG section doesn’t bother to check what they are posting.

Or that case with wrong dates in the Golden Joystick competition rules:

tr1

Or the translation fails, like the last Listy’s article, that did use some unorthodox terminology (won’t make much sense if I write it in English, but the person who translated that did not use the proper used terms at some points, or did not bother to translate words at all, such as howitzer, in Czech “houfnice”).

Or – when the missions were announced – various fails in mission translations (premium vehicles are/aren’t included part).

And these are only the recent two months’ cases (I haven’t been on this that long) – this has been going on for months now. I don’t know if other national portals have such issues too, but the Czech one is pretty terrible. I mean – sure, it gets fixed after the players call it out, but I think those mistakes shouldn’t be there in the first place. After all, those people are paid enough not to make them. It’s a shame to have players calling you out on that.

And you don’t have to trust me on this, you can ask any Czech players that are active in English forums too that I am right, the Czech portal is a mess.

Another problem is that some (not sure how many) translations are done by an external translation company, who is as you can see, not very good. Why WG hires externists I have absolutely no idea. Anyway, do other portals have these issues too, or is it just a “Czech” thing?

Solution:

Well, every good rant should have a solution proposal at the end. It’s really simple: pay more damned attention to what you post and translate and for heaven’s sake, proofread the posts before it goes out. I don’t have to, I am a blogger (but I try to). You do, you are employees.

57 thoughts on “EU: Czech portal fail (and other issues)”

      • It will be a cold day in hell before Romanians get their own, “official” forum (Treborn’s site not taken into account)

        And I don’t even wanna see the mis-translations on that theoretical portal! I’ll stick to English, thank you very much!

      • well, apparently we have ~450k Romanian players in WoT EU, but that is not enough for WG to even add a tiny forum sub-section. At least we have Treborn and a few other contributors on the unofficial site.

  5. The problem with unqualified and incompetent employees is all over WG.

    i dont get it, that a guy with 2k battles and no tier 10 feels qualified enough to even comment about premium ammo for credits…

    http://i.imgur.com/QWxqorp.jpg

    is he trolling or what? if yes, why cant i troll and get warning points instead :X

    • Oh, iScending :D
      He is pretty active on EU deleted/locking/moving useless topics. +1 for him.
      Also trolls sometimes :) (when you troll – you do it probably very harshly).

      • all my previous points werent even from him :/

        none the less i still wonder why a red 2k matches player is ven commenting on this matter…i have serious doubs he knows how matches on tier X are at the moment.

        which leads me to the question:
        are there any “skilled” mods? you know, good stats, understand how the game works etc?

          • Man you are depressing me :(

            no wonder so many things are left undone that are really annoying to the game at the moment…
            ” we know the t57 and foch are overperforming..but we arent changing things any time soon”= use it and abuse it as longs as you can
            “people spam gold ammo, so what ist there to be used”= look above: but here they arent even thinking about changing things

            gg wargaming :X

    • iScending – he is quite new in Wargaming, and if he didn’t play WoT before he started his new job, then over 2000 battles in that short time is a lot.

      And from what I have seen, he does a great job. If he trolls you, you probably trolled him first

  6. Same problem with PL version. It’s better to doublecheck on EN version for competition/event/mission details.

  8. Or all these issues could be resolved by everyone using English, like 95% (bullshit statistic, but you get my point) of other popular computer games do…splitting the community up into so many little cliques is a weird choice.

  9. hahaha, so true… post it somewhere on Czech forums -> wait for Karlie to come and ensure you that this won’t happen again -> wait for next weekend special and count all the fails -> repeat until you die of the old age -> profit

  10. I really don’t bother with national language versions… my English is good enough to understand original news

    The only translation I depend on is yours SS since I barely understand russian and still the things you translate are development stuff which can change 100 times over so even if you lose something in translation that’s not much of a problem and even that’s not an issue since you always write when you’re not 100% sure.

    Your translations and articles are quality stuff, I give you that SS.

  13. The ISU-152 was a tier 10 on the English portal too. Was fixed pretty fast though when it was noted on the forums.

  14. The problem is that the WG employees are mostly Gaming geeks and not tank nerds. While there are obvious experts they need to be focused on research and seem to have less and less time to communicate with players (or do it with excessive use of the word “obviously”). When you add cliques and friends, the useless farts that that adds to the mix you get what we have now. The english EU portal seems to almost be in shutdown fuck the players mode and have given up communicating. But I am not sure if this is a local or a issue with the information and leadership (sic) coming from HQ. Visiting the EU portal is an exercise in futility – you hope it will be worthwhile but it is the same old shit and when there is something new you cannot really trust it. I don’t much like the US portal but there is life there at least.

    If they did a fraction of the communication that this site produced it could be a whole different story. They only have to get the community discussing any one of the points raised in the Think Tank execrcise to get some intresting positive stuff rolling.

    • Don’t worry…when they need to issue some warnings they are always there….in all their incompetence…punishing you because you wrote the horrendeous word “crap” i’m disgusted by the EU forum…luckily i’m permabanned there for quite some time..

    • “The english EU portal seems to almost be in shutdown fuck the players mode and have given up communicating.”

      Kind of like the US Government. XD

  15. Maybe the company has a policy where only bad companies are hired so they will have a chance like the big companies at contracts. Communism

  16. Has anyone estimated guess how much the people doing oficial translations earn per month?
    Because if it would be only from English to Czech, it could be fine part-time job for my liking :D
    (at least I would put my lack of skills in English, with which I somehow (miraculosly) managed to get B2 level of FCE exam, to good use :D)
    Where may I apply?

  19. “simply put, the fact that when I screw up a translation, I can say sorry, fix it and nothing happens, when a WG employee screws it up, it’s like spreading false info”

    I don’t think that “accountability” is a real problem. We had that in Overlord times – he screwed it up sometimes, but he said sorry, and nothing happened; most players appreciated what he did.

    “Another problem is that some (not sure how many) translations are done by an external translation company, who is as you can see, not very good.”

    A Polish community coordinator confirmed earlier this month that “a vast majority” (for those who know Polish: “znakomita większość”) of translations is outsourced.

    “Anyway, do other portals have these issues too, or is it just a “Czech” thing?”

    When it comes to Polish portal, it’s seems random: some translations are really bad and lifeless, but on the other hand I remember that at least two times the Polish translation of the event description turned out to be fine, while the English one was incorrect.

  20. External translators can be really dodgy. I used to work to a mobile games company a lifetime ago or so, and at first we used external translators for most languages. They were sent an excel spreadsheet with the phrases to translate, and an explanation of the context where those phrases were to be used. As often as not the file came back with the explanations translated too, and things not really making sense to a native speaker. The quality of translations improved by many magnitudes when we started to make them in-house by trainees who only translated from the english master to their native language.

    • Why to bore with translation for CZ, POL and GER, Many use ENG anyway, then why WG then dont translate to ALL Eu langugages, or they focus on retards siema , CZ, GER bots?

  21. The english portal is full of errors too, sometimes they mix up credits vs XP, get numbers wrong, or just have bits of german/polish in the middle of it. It’s hilariously shoddy.

  22. Frank, why are you surprised? You won’t find intelligent people wanting to work for SerB with his Stalin shit all over and his vision of world and history. With that you just have to rely on dumb workers on EU and dumb workers do do mistakes like that…

  23. hey SS you should come and read the sea portal hahaahaha our content editor in sea will always give you a good laugh every times…

    world class company huh LMAO with such staff they have LOL

  24. Pingback: WG EU: more portal fails | For The Record

  25. Well, if you have problem with Czech translation, I can take the job as I have some experience with translations from English to Czech. Maybe I will be better, test me :-)