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by CydeWeys 2145 days ago
How is a random static marketing website for a corporation supposed to put itself into a position where it accepts community translations? How would you vet said translations before going live with them (which would be mandatory) given that you don't speak the language?

And who in the world would volunteer their labor for free to do said translations?
1 comments
PaulDavisThe1st 2145 days ago
It was intended to be a strange mixture of snark, cynicism and sarcasm connecting your described situation with what Google is doing, with the hope of illuminating the different ways people might think about their own work.

In your case, describing it as "a random static marketing website for a corporation" more or less shuts down the discussion.

In Google's case, while they probably don't see YT in those same terms, the convergence of the approach towards i18n suggests that maybe they're a little closer to it than they were.

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CydeWeys 2145 days ago
The context of this particular thread, though, is about why the user interface in an app might not be translated well. I responded by way of example explaining how translations can fall behind in a very similar situation, that of a website.

Neither of these are the same as the YouTube situation, because in the YouTube situation you're dealing with user-contributed content being translated, which is a crucial difference. Community contributions were never about translating the YouTube UI (or god forbid privacy policy, ToS, etc.); they were only ever about users submitting translations of other users' content.

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