These tree branches should sway in the wind

One of our goals for Euro Truck Simulator 2 is to make the world a bit less static and more lifelike. Trees may play a role in this effort...

The Great Translation Experiment

The community translation experiment has been running for a few days, and we can already reflect on the experience.

First of all, big thanks to anybody who decided to participate. Over 260 people joined the collective effort so far, and you can imagine that it can boost our confidence in the power and health of the truck simulator fan community when we see so many people trying to actively help.

What we are going through is not only a technical experiment, but to a large extent also a social experiment. We certainly did not expect the massive flow of input from the Turkish fans. We were surprised to see so much difference in activity between neighbor countries, like between our own Czech Republic or Slovakia. We did not expect people to try to "help" and use Google Translate to contaminate the effort with nonsense translations. We did not expect people to start competing translation of the same language if a translation sub-project was already under way. So in a lot of ways, we have learned a lot not only about quirks of the GetLocalization system and user interface, and about regional variety of the fan community, but also about people's behavior in general.

As for various smaller and bigger problems... some things could have been expected, but we really did not anticipate many of the problems. The GetLocalization system has potential to be a great tool, but there are still some teething problems to overcome, and the technical issues influenced the cooperation a lot.

It would be great if there was some support for moderating the translation rather than having it running as complete anarchy. It would also be preferably if we had initially control over which languages are allowed for translation, as in many cases two parallel sub-projects were started and lots of effort was spent twice. It would be useful to be able to send messages to individual translators, to have notice-boards or communication channels for individual languages... The feature wish-list that we communicated to GetLocalization guys is very long. For technical reasons, in the end we had no other choice but to merge the competing same-language sub-projects and rely on the voting system to let the best translations rise to the top. We couldn't just "kill" any of the competing sub-projects to have all the effort in them go to vain, we don't understand the languages enough to be the judges.

We are far from done. Maybe fatigue is already setting in, perhaps many of you were sorry to see the little flame wars between over-competitive translators, but please bear with us. Things are still settling down in many languages, but it's not over. In fact (to a large extent thanks to intelligent discussions among and with you) we'll be throwing in a wave of updated texts soon so some of the terms will have to be re-translated. We also need to come up with a way to visualize the results for you, probably through sets of screenshots in each language, so that you have feedback on problems. In many cases, words or sentences are too long and don't fit into the designated areas, so a lot of polishing is still ahead of us.

We are sure that the team at GetLocalization will continue to improve their system, and we'll use the lessons learned from Trucks & Trailers if we decide to involve the community again in translation of Euro Truck Simulator 2.

Progress on a new cabin interior

We are working on many new things and improvements for Euro Truck Simulator 2, and one of the areas we focus on is building several all-new highly detailed cabins. Here is another glimpse on a work-in-progress asset.

Schiphol Indeed

This place is not in Sweden, nor Germany, nor France like some commentators guessed, it's in the Netherlands.

Where is this place? #3

There are not many places in Europe where a highway passes so close to the airport that you can almost touch passing jumbos...

The power of the community #2

Within 12 hours of launching the Trucks & Trailers community translation project, 4 languages were already completed. Now 3 more hours later, we are up to 6 completed languages, and every minute some 10 more strings are translated across the mix of 20+ languages. All this was happening on Friday evening and night (at least for European participants). If anything is a clear indicator of the dedication and strength of the truck sim fan community, this must be it. Amazing!

The work is not quite done yet, even for the languages that the system reports as 100% done the review process is still under way. People can vote for the best translation if there are several competing variants, or still suggest alternatives and improvements. It is still worth it to join in and help.

http://www.trucks-and-trailers.com/localization.html

The initial list of languages entered by SCS seems to have been extended by people offering help with even more languages. However it seems that there is now also a bit a mess being created, for example we had "Turkish (Turkey)" as one of the choices, but in parallel somebody started "Turkish" sub-project, so now it's very likely that some of the effort is lost as the Turkish contributors are split into two uncooperative groups. Please concentrate just on the more-completed variant.

Translation in full swing

Again, we are humbled. In a few short hours, the translation has already progressed a lot even during the test stage. So far the technical side looks good, too, we can pull the translated strings from the system just fine.

We are opening the translation to the whole community, we don't want anybody who felt like contributing to feel ignored.

Please start by visiting this page:
http://www.trucks-and-trailers.com/localization.html

The game is still in the polishing stages of the development. Regarding the in-game texts, this means that as the User Interface is still changing, some text may still be changed, or erased, or added. But large majority of the text is already in place, and the system supports further tweaks.

As more people join in the translation effort, inevitably we'll start seeing conflicts and clashes. Each piece of text, be it a simple word or a full sentence, can be translated by multiple people in parallel. Then people can vote on each other's translation or mark a translation as problematic. This process may bring some frustration as people may start arguing over who's translation is the best. We still hope that this can be overcome by the collective wisdom of the community and that the best quality wins.

To thank you, here is a few more pictures from Trucks & Trailers. Thank you very very much!

Trucks & Trailers translation milestone

Today we'll be launching a testing stage of the community translation effort. We need to find out if the crowd-sourced translation solution we have chosen is really as good as we hope it to be.

This stage is invitation-only, based on this test we hope to be ready to invite anybody willing to participate to join in eventually. We should know more next week.

We'll be sending invitation e-mails later today. For now, here is a few new pictures from T&T...

ETS2 picture of the day

We are very busy today to write much info on the blog, but we thought another nice picture may make your visit here worthwhile.