How a whole language of the Steam Translation Server was shut down - and why it's important to you

Bump for a crappy situation.
You don't help a billion dollar company for free, they should have jumped ship long ago.
Steam is awesome, but it's also a scam-artist milking a cashcow till it dies of dehydration.
Gabe left long ago and is laughing his ass off at all the adoration, laughing all the way to the bank.

I withdrew from STS Vietnamese after seeing how those stupid moderators dealt with the translation. Basically they edited my translated tokens into something NOT understandable...

Lol @ harassing Clint because he sits up late to translate. "Takes away opportunity from other people with responsibilities"... That's how the world works, you have things called "priorities" and if you want something, you adjust yourself accordingly instead of trying to pull down others who actually have the stuff you "kind of" want, as their #1 priority.

Bump for this, also seems like the same crappy thing happened with the Italian team too.

Bump, I first thought "TL;DR", but then I thought that it's sad that that was my reaction, so I came back and read this.

This is a bad situation. I always thought that it's a bad idea dor Valve to use non-paid translators, but this is really bad. I hope that if this turns out to be true, it's going to hurt Valve's PR.

Also, it's funny that the Polish steam store has the translation for the current sale, but the Spanish one does not.

Bump, and mail sent.

BUMP

the whole story seems shady on valve's part

And the news in that is…? I would have thunk people realised this when they went ahead with Bethesda's request and introduced the paid mods system. Or, heck, the paid CS:GO skins.

"Also, maybe we should send some email to our lord and pray for his holiness in this situation."

See, this is what got us in this situation in the first place. This might have been cute at first, but then people started using it all the time and it turns every serious discussing about real issues with the Steam platform and how Valve shits/tries to shit on it's customers into a joke. And Valve knows this, Gaben knows this, all he has to do to make people forget is personally "fix" some pleb's issue(because that's what we all are to them anyway) or do one of those bullshit AMAs where he answers none of the serious questions like why Valve has taken no steps to fix it's utter shit support or why Early Access is still a scam infested cesspool, but instead answers questions about what kind of ice cream he likes or some other inane crap. But hey, praise Gaben.

And no, this rant was not aimed at the OP, it's aimed at all of us Steam users in general, at this point we are as much to blame as Valve is, we let it come to this.

voluntary work
for valve
valve earns millions
you work for free

i never understood these people doing charity for big companies...
like, valve can't pay employees to translate?

i get the idea behind the concept of trying to help people that don't understand other languages, but you are working for free to let valve earn more money from people that only speak spanish. it's really dumb.

STS already wasn't all pink and pretty at first. I tried to join the french team back in 2011 (or 2010? Can't recall) and I stopped because of the approval system that was on place. Limited approved translations in order to be able to contribute more. The thing is, when you're doing a good translation and that the french administrator basically cancels yours, copy-paste it as his, you can't pretty much get approved translations. I don't know if it happened to others, but when you realize that 1 translation out of 2 is going to be removed from your account although you only wanted to help, that doesn't give you any will to contribute any further.

As for the case of competition between translators, sadly it's not limited to STS. I've been in the french TES & Fallout mod translating "community" (I don't think we can call it a community now) for almost 7 years and before Skyrim, we were basically all working together to make the best translations possible. But with Skyrim's release... "screw that, I want teh endorsements and donations!" a good half of the people who were contributing without asking for anything were suddenly attracted by independence and personal exposure. That's why you can find on the Nexus french translations with more than 100 endorsements that are basically just a trip to Google Translate land or translations that are barely detailed or with a wall of text that basically means "I'm great, follow me on Twitter, Facebook and Twitch".

Sadly, people are now interested in quick things rather than quality stuff. Supply and demand, they said.

As for the Torsten thing, it sucks. You should just stop contributing as long as this issue is not solved. But my cynical side says that people who don't give a shit will probably take the opportunity to just replace good translators. And after that, we get propaganda saying that gamers are unite, blah blah blah... Sorry, cynical side still speaking.

I'm sorry but it is hard to sympathize with peeps who are willing to work for a multimillion dollar company for free.

Hi everybody, I just want to point that this is the story told by one person. I've not read it all but you know... you need to hear both parts of the story to know half of the true... so please, apply that to any problem you read about anything :)

HR works for the best interest of the company. What did they expect to happen when volunteers threaten to "strike" if their demands weren't met? That's an employee privilege.