Wednesday, February 10, 2016

Crisis in the Steam Translation Server (STS)

Greetings, dear ghosts and surprised former readers who now realize they forgot to remove this blog from their RSS feeds. Today I bring something of importance I'd like to share about videogame localization and, more precisely, the STS.

Those of you who follow or used to follow my blog Las Chancletas de Hermes, written in Spanish, may remember about the Steam Translation Server, a crowdsourcing tool by Valve Software for fans to translate their games for them. I once was a member, although my opinion on it has changed A LOT over time (heh, overtime).

With good reason, too. Today I read about the terrible situation that the Spanish group of the STS is currently going through. You can read all about it following the link below. Even though I haven't translated for the STS for years, Ï found it quite relevant, since the translation of the entire Steam website depends on this.


https://www.reddit.com/r/Steam/comments/44yl24/how_a_whole_language_of_the_steam_translation/


I now very few people still visit this blog, and even fewer will read this. Anyway, here's a quick copypasted TL;DR by the author of the Reddit post:

TL;DR: There has been a huge mess involving Valve’s employee Torsten Zabka and the Spanish team of Steam Translation Server that has resulted a strike from the whole team, and 2 valuable colleagues being expelled, one of them being a Valve employee that also got fired. We want to share the story to reach Valve’s attention and show the community that not everything around is pretty.

Thanks to @fjgaldo, former mod of the Spanish STS, for telling me about this.

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