A Linguistic Experience: Meet the Translation Projects!

[Lumari]

Let's take a look at the one forum where English eloquence won't necessarily get you anywhere!​

A Linguistic Experience: Meet the Translation Projects!​

Credits:
Written by: Lou
Quality checked by: Reisen and Haund
Grammar checked by: Electrolyte and GMars
Art by: Cretacerus
HTML by: Naziel

This article (unsurprisingly) is also available in Italian, translated by AlphaWittem; in French, translated by TMan87; in German, translated by Marcell, Cretacerus, and Fischgrat; in Portuguese, translated by Mitsuki; and in Spanish, translated by Lou!

 

[Oglemi]

Might be worth a belated mention in the History section, but the translations project is actually much, much older than what was stated in the article.

https://www.smogon.com/forums/forums/2011-2013-translation-projects.187/ While this forum is already quite old having started in 2011, this was merely the start of a concerted effort to have many facets of the site translated into many different languages. The French project actually started much earlier in the old VB Social Groups (which you can see hinted at by Bloo's post in the French thread), and way prior to that many other parts of the site were translated into Spanish and French by Setsuna and Agammemnon and Maaf (I believe), as well as to Japanese thanks to Chou Toshio. Unfortunately, I think the loss of the Social Groups in the transition to xenforo was what killed the continuation of the translations project until the latest iteration detailed in the article.

And actually looking through the SCMS I don't even know if ANY of the old translations from that time period survived. Sadface

 

[Reisen]

Unfortunately, I think the loss of the Social Groups in the transition to xenforo was what killed the continuation of the translations project until the latest iteration detailed in the article.

What killed the old translations project was actually the lack of global organization. Indeed before starting it myself I've checked this project and tried to find what actually happened so I wouldn't reproduce the same mistake and they actually called their Translations Project as if a global translation, which means they weren't only translating The Smog articles but also ingame articles / credits, pokedex pages.

I've also talked with Aga before starting this work and he explained me that the lack of communication which led to a lack of motivation was the main issue of that project. Afaik it didn't live that long (3 months~) and tried a reboot a year after and still failed. That's a little detail but for the history I guess it would be nice to mention it.