Please note that all the quotes in this post have been modified by me to make the identification of the source impossible. The meaning is kept.
Hello everyone,
recently, one of the official Wargaming translators wrote me an interesting mail about the way Wargaming translation works and where do the various stronk translatink cases come from. Needless to say, I was surprised and pleased, that someone decided to talk about it openly, but also a bit suspicious. He predicted my suspicions however and provided a proof that is impeccable (some of it I cannot publish, some of it you will see in the future posts).
Here is an excerpt of the quite long e-mail I recieved from this person. It’s rather interesting. For starters, most translators apparently work from home, with their capabilities being examined via a test, that comes directly from Minsk. Apparently, some of the notorious translation fails appear as such (quoting from the mail):
Perhaps I should clarify you a bit of these fails I’ve been seeing, it’s usually because the text files come directly from Minsk and it takes up to 7 translators and proofreaders to verify, the problem lies that not all translators agree on the kind of words to use and the result can be a PR nightmare to solve, which requires several proofreadings – in time, people slip up as you have seen in the portals, or sometimes the webmasters screw up.
Sometimes, according to the translator, things also get “interesting” when stuff that gets sent from Minsk has issues. A typical example would be the T2 Light Tank, which is a full name of the vehicle, so what in Russian sounds perfectly fine (“T2 Light Tank легкий танк второго уровня”) gets translated into something retarded (“T2 Light Tank light tank”) because the “T2 Light Tank” is a full name of the vehicle and the contracts the translators have binds them to use it in each case.
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