Imagine this: you want to read the whitepaper or instructions of a project you're interested in, but it's written in English. It's not your mother tongue, and even though your English is good, reading 100 pages about a project with all its technical terms in that language gives you a headache and you can't quite grasp all the details. It's pretty important that you read the information, because you're planning to invest, or make use of the project for your own project.
What to do?
Now, there are three things you could do.
You could have the project translated by any translation agency, and pay the (often high) costs for this. Then you'd have to wait the time it takes to have the documents translated into your preferred language before you can access it. This takes time, and we all know that time is money. Another thing to consider here is that there are many, many translation agencies out there. Some good, some not so good and another few downright awful. It is very time-consuming to find the a good translation agency. If you're unlucky and have to deal with one of the lesser ones, what you're left with is an incomprehensible, rubbish translation full of mistakes. That's a lot of time and money wasted.
Your second option would be to 'guess' what the document is all about, trust that it's what you want, and go for it. Not a lot of people are willing to do this. Would you?
This leaves us with the third option: leave the project be, and move on to another that is translated into your language.
It's not very hard to conclude that a lot of people would choose to do the latter, which is a shame because you never know: you could have passed up an amazing project. It's also a bitter pill to swallow for the project owners because they worked so hard to create something amazing and now they possibly lost a potential client or investor.
And let's face it: there are many amazing (open source) projects out there that simply don't have the resources to pay for translations into a lot of languages.
What a shame! Wouldn't it be great to have all those projects available in more languages?
What does DaVinci do?
And we've done this very well.
Between June 2018 and today, DaVinci has put together 20 different language teams, and these teams have translated more than 2 million words, in 45 different projects. Some of the projects that have been, or are being translated at the moment are, among others:
- SteemMonsters
- Byteball
- Node.js
- Steem Whitepaper
- Steeminvite
- Steem Blue paper
- eSteem
- electron
- Warriorjs
- Joomla
This kind of work can only be achieved by hard work, and the dedication of staff, translators and Language Managers alike. After all: we are all working towards the same goal: provide quality translations of important projects in as many languages as possible. It's a process that hasn't come easy, and as a new project, there have been many things that had to be changed, improved and learned. We are all still learning, but so far, the dedication of all the people involved has brought us to where we are today.
The importance of our work
The world is constantly changing. The world of technology even more so, and most people here, will know that this is definitely the case with blockchain-technology.
It is a fact that most project documents are written in English.
However, the Asian market accounts for more than 60%, with the Chinese languages taking the largest share. As for other languages: there are people in every country of the world who need to be able to access the needed information in their own language.
Not having all these projects translated into these languages, wouldn't only be a shame, it's really not an option!
We've come so far in this world in regards to (blockchain) technology, it would be completely useless if millions or even billions of people can't read the project documents!
We often hear people say that the blockchain and cryptocurrency should be brought to as many people as possible, in as many countries as possible, and the best way to do this is by having translations ready for these people to read.
And we need to be able to keep doing what we do and provide quality translations.
Changes
DaVinci is still working very closely with Utopian. Our translators and language managers all work on a voluntary basis, with the chance of receiving an upvote from Utopian.
Since DaVinci started with translations, we've had to make a lot of changes, in order to keep working with Utopian in the best possible way. As we all had to learn along the way, adjustments had to be made. We've gone from teams of 5 for each language, to a maximum of 3. When we first started, each translator could hand in a translation each day but this soon proved to be too much as translations were outnumbering other contributions by far.
We went from 5 or more translations per week for every translator, to a maximum of 5 translations per team. These choices weren't always easy, but it was always with the best interest of all involved parties in mind.
Our witness
As stated before, the DaVinci team highly depends on Utopian. And although the team has no intentions to break the bond we've built with Utopian, we do believe that our project should become stronger. Our witness is outside of the first 100, and most people will know that maintaining a witness is costly.
It would, therefore, be appreciated if you would consider voting for our witness
Conclusion
The world of blockchain technology and cryptocurrency is constantly moving and changing. Most blockchain projects have one thing in common: they want to provide the world with game-changing projects and bring it to as many people as possible. Imagine a world without translations. The most important scientific, historic and other documents would never be known or even heard about by many, many people. Think about what a different world it would be!
Knowledge is power, and the only way to assure that everyone has an equal chance to acquire this knowledge, is by having translations done is as many languages as possible.
DaVinci has worked hard to provide these translations to whoever needs it.
We would love to keep doing this and so much more.
Not only is it important in the business world, but it truly brings us all closer together and opens up the world of the blockchain to anyone.
