So I’ve been pretty quiet lately. I don’t like doing too many of these posts. There is a real danger in development that you tell people that something is “COMING SOON!” and then a life reality hits, for example my son had appendicitis last week, or a complex development reality hits, I’m looking at you legacy Asset fields, and “COMING SOON!” turns into “COMING SOME AT SOME POINT…”.
I’ll start with me first, development on QW hasn’t stopped, it never does but more on that later. I’ve been trying to do more writing lately and I’m trying to find an agent for my first book. If anyone knows of a good agent who is looking for a book about two young brothers who discover that their local forest is full of weird and monstrous creatures then please shout up. It’s obviously a lot more exciting than that I just don’t want to muddy things up here with a full elevator pitch. Also, if you know of any site or publication that is accepting short stories, mostly for the fantasy and science fiction genres then I’d be much obliged if you could send me their details. In short, I’m trying to get my work out there, although it seems most of the American publications and sites are on holiday until 1st September.
As an aside, I’ve created a new type of asset for my story called “Literary Agent” and added some agents I plan to send my book to. Yay, the custom assets are working out.
Now onto QW news. Some of the most frequent requests I’ve had lately are related to translations of the QW interface into other languages (hello Turkish feature requesters, I haven’t forgotten about you!)
It’s an old request and I’ve struggled with how to effectively implement it for a long time. On the surface it sounds like an easy problem to solve, someone would like to help and provide their services, usually free of charge, to create a translation. Sounds great and it is very generous, I can’t stress that enough. In reality though, and isn’t reality always this way, localization of an interface is a complex and tricky thing to do. The main issue is that I don’t want to own or be responsible for the translations. That is, I don’t want to have to pay to get a translation checked or be responsible for keeping it up to date. For example, if someone provides me with a translation file I have no way of knowing whether they have written the German equivalent, for example, of “Trololololo” for each string. To check I would need to either pay someone or find someone who I trust who could check it. Neither option is great.
My solution to this somewhat intractable problem will not involve trust. Instead I intend to allow end users to validate the translation for me and for the originator of the translation to accept responsibility for it, so if you provide a translation you’ll need to provide an email address and at least tacitly agree to keep it up to date and fix issues found with it. If you don’t respond to comments on the translation from end users then the translation will be removed or, if it’s abandoned, given to someone else. Each translation can be voted on to give end users a feeling of confidence in the text provided. For example, there may be three competing translation files for a particular language, this may sound strange but translation is more art than science (try using Google Translate for anything more complex than “Hello, I’d like a sausage sandwich”) thus one person may translate a phrase one way, someone else another way, the votes will give a confidence measure of the accuracy and usefulness of the translated text. Translations will also be versioned and the email address of the translation owner available for end users to contact.
End users will be able to use multiple translations within a stack, where one translation overlays the previous one, thus if something is missing from one translation file, another may provide it.
In short, QW will provide a framework where other people can generate and provide translations but I don’t have to try and make sure they are correct.
I’m currently in the middle of moving the interface over so that it can use strings from a file. Surprisingly there is a lot of text in QW. I’m also having to change the way that the strings are used so that they are as language unbiased as I can make them. Thus I don’t prescribe how a string should be phrased or laid out, just that it is there. It’s a complex thing to do.
Unfortunately I can’t really say for sure how far through I am at the moment. Tips, achievements and the main project window are done, as is most of the problem finder but I’ve still got editor mode and the rest of the interface to do. In other words, I don’t have an ETA yet, but watch this space, I’ll do a “COMING SOONISH!” post with more details when I’m closer to finishing.
