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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Dioltach" data-source="post: 8133485" data-attributes="member: 21843">Speaking as a professional translator, there are a lot of dodgy translations out there. It's a more difficult job than it might seem to an outsider, particularly if the subject matter is in a specialist field. But there's a lot of pressure on rates, and freelancers who work for translation agencies are paid less now than they were 20 years ago. Combined with tight deadlines, this often leads to large projects being farmed out to dozens of less experienced translators, with the agency (which will take the lion's share of the fee that the client pays) supposedly reviewing all the separate bits for quality and consistency - but in practice this step will often be skipped, or only paid lip service. Freelancers who are being paid a pittance will be less likely to put much effort into their work, assuming (rightly or wrongly) that the agency's margin should cover quality control.Even worse is MTPE: Machine Translation with Post-Editing, where an agency will run the text through machine translation software, and then pay someone to make sure that it's a good translation. Again, the rates are never high enough to justify a skilled translator devoting the time and effort necessary to ensure a decent standard of quality.Presumably a thorough round of playtesting of any translation would be needed to make sure that every rule is clear, that it's been translated as it was intended, and that the text overall is consistent. And WotC asking "reviewers on its staff who are fluent in Korean" to look at the text won't reveal every quality issue, and (based on my own experience of how many clients review translation work) likely didn't involve much more than, "Hey, you speak Korean, right? Could you randomly look at a few sentences and see whether they make sense?"</blockquote>

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