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January 31, 2010
You will find the accounting Excel file here, which I will upload and update from time to time.
Most of the light yellow part has been copied from Transit during preparation of the files, where the light blue vertical strip is calculated based on the percentages of fuzzy match payments as advertised on the Transit Termstar Help page.
To the right of the light blue strip is the Total Amount column, which calculates the total amount for each file (note that this customer is paying in USD, so to simplify everything we need to agree on USD). That amount depends on your per word rate, which you should input into cell E1.
If you would like to calculate your total earnings, click somewhere in the light yellow area and press CTRL A on your keyboard (select all). This should highlight the entire wordcount area (including Comment etc.). Now in Excel go to the menu Data > Sort, and for Sort By select Column C (your usercode number), make sure "No header row" is selected and then press OK. This should sort all the data according to translator.
If you then want to calculate your total earnings, select some cell and write into it: "=sum(" without the quotation marks. Then drag over top of your totals only. Let go of the mouse, and close your cell's equation with a closed bracket ")". Press enter and you should get your calculation.
This section concerns the first five sheets of the big Excel file and concerns the names of characters in the games and the weapons and tools they might use. I am copying the customer's comments below. Generally I have convinced it that this section can be torturous so it has agreed to allow us certain liberties what concerns a literal translation, or leave some in English or Chinese, where more suitable. If you do leave it in the original language you may ALT INS it to claim payment for it, but please try not to abuse this privilege. All files will be proofread and quality controlled to make sure that the customer will be happy.
I
think having literal translations for all proper names except for things that
are game specific words is okay. I think you’re right in that we should have
very literal translations of nouns and if a translation can’t be thought of
quickly (most likely because the word is a made-up word for the game or derived
from a Chinese name), keep those words in English.
The names were kept to sound Chinese/Asian since it is a very Asian setting.
To be clear, do you mean character names? Monsters? Items? Skills? I
think keeping character names the same is OK. I think some monster names should
be localized, like red fox shouldn’t be kept as red fox, but a name that is more
Chinesy should be kept as is. This rule should apply to Items and skills.
I
agree that most proper names sound good as they are and that it should remain as
they are. I don't want all proper names to remain in English though. Words that
have French or English equivalents should be localized. Any non-made up or
special fantasy terms. Let me give some examples, and hopefully this will help:
Localize all of the following:
Shard Plate,
Armor of Sorrow,
Brilliant Cassock,
Silk Hairband,
Hairband of Force,
Formless Shoes,
Wandering Wraith,
Moaning Harpy,
Monkey Phantasm,
Pyrasteel (keep in English)
Boots(localize),
Snoutnose (keep in English unless there is a French/German equivalent)
Savage (localize),
Buzz (keep in English unless there is a French/German equivalent)
Pack (localize),
Zaaras (keep in English)
Spellbinder (keep in English unless there is a French/German equivalent),
Also, item names (small string of words, each with first capital letter) have a
31 CHARACTER LIMIT (so be careful of
this when translating).
Here is some file which should help describe the proper names and some abbreviations. You can right click on the link and select Save Target As if you do not want to open it in your browser but rather download the Excel file to your computer.
I hope to get a big team working on these names (85,000 words) to get it over with quickly. I will try to add them to the glossary and import them into the rest of the project so that you would not have to type them out in the future.
On the bottom status bar strip in Transit you will see
"Seg:" followed by a number, which refers to the segment number if we ever need
to reference it, and then followed by "Pos:", meaning position. This is ideal to
calculate the 31 character limitations for proper names.
But one major problem is the abbreviations, because Transit
interprets the period as the end of a sentence and separates it into its own
segment. Some abbreviations are a single letter, so it could get confusing.
Recently the customer sent me a list of abbreviations (on this project's
website), but this was after I had already created the files, so I could not
catch this earlier.
The positive side is that, unless you are translating a
repetitions file (which is not that often - and you will always know when), the
segments follow each other.
If you followed my advice of showing each segment on new
line (which personally I find easier to deal with), you might get:
The cat crossed hyper.
calac.
street.
Where "hyper." and "calac." are some abbreviations.
Obviously it will be difficult for you to calculate a 31
character limit for this string of 3 segments, but please just try. Otherwise
the customer will simply have to hire someone in-house to worry about this when
working in the software environment once the translation is complete. It
provided the abbreviations file rather late so now it will have to deal with it.
But at least we could try.
You only need to use abbreviations if it looks like it is required to get to 31 or less characters (within the string of words/abbreviations - which, unfortunately, you will have to guess or interpret somehow); otherwise you can expand the abbreviations when translating.
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