Translation quality

[y3v63n]

I've been here on the forum for a few months now (I guess from November) doing social bounties and recently investing too. Being a native Russian speaker and an in-house translator myself, I've checked quite a few translated Whitepapers out of curiosity and was stunned how bad the quality was. Many, I believe, were just post-edited after being Google-translated.

Understandably, this irks me as a professional because among the papers that I had checked were very well-performing projects and I assume the "translators" were paid tons of money for the job that would normally be rejected in the real-world translation business.

Also, the current selection process of translators makes me laugh. Just show "how many whitepapers you translated" and that's it. Seriously? Translation involves both creative and technical skills that people master for years.

So, it would be nice to learn how is the situation with other languages here. Is that bad too?

And I would welcome suggestions from senior members of the forum and maybe bounty managers on how the situation can be improved.

[1715082431]

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[DigitalFox]

I've been here on the forum for a few months now (I guess from November) doing social bounties and recently investing too. Being a native Russian speaker and an in-house translator myself, I've checked quite a few translated Whitepapers out of curiosity and was stunned how bad the quality was. Many, I believe, were just post-edited after being Google-translated.

Understandably, this irks me as a professional because among the papers that I had checked were very well-performing projects and I assume the "translators" were paid tons of money for the job that would normally be rejected in the real-world translation business.

Also, the current selection process of translators makes me laugh. Just show "how many whitepapers you translated" and that's it. Seriously? Translation involves both creative and technical skills that people master for years.

So, it would be nice to learn how is the situation with other languages here. Is that bad too?

And I would welcome suggestions from senior members of the forum and maybe bounty managers on how the situation can be improved.

I feel you In many cases ANN and WP translations and terrible. Few days ago I saw threads where people check and report really bad ones but I can't remember which section I saw it in.

[theyoungmillionaire]

-snip-

I do not read more whitepapers because I only hold bitcoin and some trusted coins. As an investor, we only look for details such as stability, team, company behind, road map, contiguity plan, etc. I am sure people will agree that they don’t really check the whitepaper’s English proficiency, as long as we understand their purpose, security of investments and we will have continuous profit, it's good to go.

[DigitalFox]

-snip-

I do not read more whitepapers because I only hold bitcoin and some trusted coins. As an investor, we only look for details such as stability, team, company behind, road map, contiguity plan, etc. I am sure people will agree that they don’t really check the whitepaper’s English proficiency, as long as we understand their purpose, security of investments and we will have continuous profit, it's good to go.

How are you supposed to "understand their purpose, security of investments" without careful study of the WP which is supposed to contain all tech details and calculations?

[theyoungmillionaire]

-snip-

I do not read more whitepapers because I only hold bitcoin and some trusted coins. As an investor, we only look for details such as stability, team, company behind, road map, contiguity plan, etc. I am sure people will agree that they don’t really check the whitepaper’s English proficiency, as long as we understand their purpose, security of investments and we will have continuous profit, it's good to go.

How are you supposed to "understand their purpose, security of investments" without careful study of the WP which is supposed to contain all tech details and calculations?

The topic is about "Translation quality" not to study the whitepapers by details. You can re-read OP’s topic and my reply for better understanding.

[paxmao]

I do some works as Spanish translator for ICOs. I only take 3 to 4 translation and moderation tasks at the same time and put the time required into them. Also, not everyone out there that speaks two languages is able to properly translate documents with legal, technological, economic, medical, games and many other speciality contents.

I have read a few WP translated by colleagues, and I can only say that ICO managers tend to choose based on how many WP the person has previously translated and translators tend to take as much work as possible. Inevitably, this means that many translations are crap.

For example, last week I was choosen as a proofreader for a document with around 300 paragraphs of text and around 100 of them had noticeable issues and another 100 some short of small mistakes. This means that the person has not even taken a second read to the document.

To bounty managers: Make sure you are paying for something that has a reasonable quality and use always an idependent proofreader along with the translator. Your clients do not deserve having shitty papers that do more harm than good to their projects.
 

[y3v63n]

I feel you In many cases ANN and WP translations and terrible. Few days ago I saw threads where people check and report really bad ones but I can't remember which section I saw it in.

It would be nice to have a look at that thread. I'm sure I'd be able to contribute

[y3v63n]

-snip-

I do not read more whitepapers because I only hold bitcoin and some trusted coins. As an investor, we only look for details such as stability, team, company behind, road map, contiguity plan, etc. I am sure people will agree that they don’t really check the whitepaper’s English proficiency, as long as we understand their purpose, security of investments and we will have continuous profit, it's good to go.

I'm not speaking only about language profficiency here. In the end, the pragmatic purpose of these translations is to provide accurate info to investors. But bad grammar and syntax contribute to unreadability. There are WPs that I read in Russian and don't understand what the hell they are talking about. Moreover, there are plenty of mistranslations/omissions/additions, etc. that lead to factual mistakes as well. This leads to my second point. Why pay people if investors can just put it into Google and have the same result, with less brushing up maybe?

[y3v63n]

I do some works as Spanish translator for ICOs. I only take 3 to 4 translation and moderation tasks at the same time and put the time required into them. Also, not everyone out there that speaks two languages is able to properly translate documents with legal, technological, economic, medical, games and many other speciality contents.

I have read a few WP translated by colleagues, and I can only say that ICO managers tend to choose based on how many WP the person has previously translated and translators tend to take as much work as possible. Inevitably, this means that many translations are crap.

For example, last week I was choosen as a proofreader for a document with around 300 paragraphs of text and around 100 of them had noticeable issues and another 100 some short of small mistakes. This means that the person has not even taken a second read to the document.

To bounty managers: Make sure you are paying for something that has a reasonable quality and use always an idependent proofreader along with the translator. Your clients do not deserve having shitty papers that do more harm than good to their projects.
 

Agree with all points!

[MJK_Anfaenger]

I can relate to that. I frequently do German translations and the amount of crappy ones I come across is staggering. There are a few people on this forum who deliver solid translations, but more often than not they're are a hot mess. I'm talking errors-in-every-paragraph-bad.

It's not always the translator's fault either, most original WPs I've read had spelling errors in varying amounts or sometimes sentences just don't make sense and translators have to guess. Sometimes it's just so much it's not worth checking back with the project and you just pull through and don't look back.

I think one of the problems is that bounty-managers confuse quantity with quality. I get it, there is very little else to go from when you don't speak the native language, but holy moly, there's got to be a better way. Maybe hire an independent proof-reader, so you have a higher chance to get someone who knows what they're doing. And projects should invest some hard currency to get a professional to check their original English documents for them; it's the first impression they leave on potential investors and it should be a positive one.

It would be much less frustrating to work with them also.

[Chriske92]

I myself am i Dutch translator. And in my local thread i see some translators, which work in group with bounty managers, posting every day new translations. I can't make every day a new thread and translations, for the reason i have a life besides crypto. My translations take some time, but i do utterly best to make them as good as possible.

But i see that google chrome translates every page possible, maybe these people translates it by Chrome and changes some words here and there to just not get caught on cheating.

My ANN threads will be always updated with the newest updates possible, but if you have 20+ threads and doing new one's i'm sure quantity stands higher than quality