Translations in open-source world and Utopian
I have started translating Electron docs to Turkish for a while ago. At first, coverage of translations on Turkish was %3 on that project.
After I have got a couple of approvals on Utopian about Electron translations, I have noticed that other contributors on Utopian started bombarding the project with translations.
That was happy news, right? Electron is a good project and people actually care to translate the huge documentation.
Today, I had a look to other contributors and checked their translations if they're okay or not. Sadly, most of them are bad translations.
I don't accuse anyone to use Google Translate or other machine translate tools. However, I can't imagine, Turkish people try to learn Electron by using this Turkish translations. They would probably just give up learning it.
The problem
Translation is a serious business. If you need to translate a Javascript framework docs, you actually need to know in order:
- Basic programming
- Javascript
- Related framework
If you have no idea about the context, you will %100 end up with bad translations.
Also, even you know these things but you don't know both languages well, it is highly possible that you will also end up with bad translations.
Current state of translation contributions
I really wonder the percent of the translations actually merged into the open-source projects those accepted at Utopian as a valid contribution.
Numbers are good at the first glance. Even Crowdin's quarterly business reports probably had a boost due to contributions via Utopian. However, I have an educated guess that only %3-5 of the translations actually has the required quality to be an approved contribution.
Utopian try to adapt itself on translations to fight with low-quality translations and abuse from the start. It is now harder to create an accepted contribution in this category.
However, I don't think that the current rules are helpful to the open-source community due to "bounty hunter' low-quality translators. They adapt, too. They learned how to create "pull requests". And basic file edits are much easier then Crowdin translation page.
Actually, I can create a program that automatically creates pull requests with an automated google-translate on different languages.
We're on a state that bounty hunters will start hurting open-source maintainers' time by sending zero quality contributions. If the maintainer can't find a proof-reader worse thing these non-sense translations can actually be merged into the upstream. Because open-source world has a built-in trust normally.
The solution
None. As long as Utopian rewards translations with that $$$$, people always find ways to abuse it. I was enjoying the "no Crowdin" rule because it eliminates most of the abusers. With the upcoming collaboration with Crowdin, the situation may be better, but It doesn't look like it's working right now.
Contribute to get rewards
This is the biggest side effect. Translations category has problems but abuse is in place almost all categories. That's because, people actually "contribute" to get rewards. Contributors should think that the rewards as an extra compensation. (may happen or not.) But I am pretty sure, a lot of people see that as a kind of gig.
End of the rant.
Internally, We've been talking about this issue a lot. In fact, there's many proposed solutions, but the one we might be going with in the end is what Utopian was always supposed to be in the long run - reward the best contributions, not all of them.
This will 100% remove all of the abusers from the website, and while it will likely hurt our growth by a lot, people that can actually contribute quality content to the project will earn much, much more money.
Keep in mind that nothing's been decided yet and even if this was to go through, we're far away from that, time wise. We're open to discussion and feedback on temporary fixes though.
Crowdin'de Türkçe çeviriler ne durumda diye ufak bir araştırma yaptım. Bir Excell tablosu ekledim. Belki incelemek istersin. Umarım çeviri platformu için faydalı olur.
https://steemit.com/tr/@cashthekush/inceleme-crowdin-tuerkce-ceviri-ne-durumdayiz-or-busy
Eline saglik.
Teşekkürler 👍
Haklısın ben de bir ara bakmıştım sonra bıraktım çünkü yarısını benim çevirip yarısını başkasının çevirdiği bir uygulamada dil bütünlüğü olmadığını görünce saçma sapan bir şey oldu. Ben de niyeyse çok takılıyorum böyle şeylere. Bizim de Github'ta projelerimiz var ve open source olayını çok önemsiyorum herhalde ondan. Kalite hoşuma gitmeyince sıkıntı bastı bıraktım sonuç olarak. Sadece para için değil de gerçekten yaptığı işin neye yaradığını anlayarak yapanlar gerçekten faydalı bir iş yapıyorlar ama ne kadarı öyledir bilemiyorum. Kendi projelerime yapılmasını istemezdim açıkçası.
thank you. for sharing the information. i like to find information about turki country
I totally agree on all what you said there, actually, when it was on github only, the translation abuse was deduced about 97% of the abuse that utopian have before.
but, people are thinking a lot of ways how to abuse the system while utopian is thinking a way to avoid those abuse.
I love to electron project too and have contributed with same reason. learn electron and make korean translation. I hope more valid translations get an increasement on utopian.
Good job!this is gonna be interesting!i waiting for your next post.
This type of comments are considered spam. Dont do it.