That sounds like a very ambitious idea. I'd be more than willing to give you a hand. But even with that site, I don't know if we would have any more people than how ever many people have posted in this thread. In that sense, it may be a bit overkill... but it would still be a great way to get results.

Well, basically, I need to work with these technologies for my job, and I need a project I can mess around with. It needs to allow for collaboration, multiple user accounts, file processing, and using the Zend Framework.

This pretty much fits the bill, so I think it's a great project for me to cut my teeth on.

It may be overkill, but I also think it's the best way of making sure that everyone's work stays consistent and is useable by me. There are thousands and thousands of text fragments, and if this is ever going to get done, I absolutely need consistency in the translations otherwise updating the disc image will be impossibly tedious and it won't ever get done.

I don't know how much different Zend Framework is from CodeIgniter, but I'm sure it uses a lot of the same principles. I may experiment with it in the future.

Of course, I'm willing to add all my Japanese knowledge to it.

It's another MVC framework. But it's a lot lower-level than CI. Basically its a framework that lets you write your own framework - so it's much more technically challenging and complex. Not exactly a good thing for simple systems, because you have to reinvent the wheel to get it working in a useable site, unlike with CI.

But, for the work I'm doing at my job, I need all the power of ZF (I'm programming a huge, extremely complex, intranet system that will interface with external systems and be used in several departments). But ZF is overkill for most projects.

However, ZF is developed by Zend (the company that created PHP). So it has a lot of nice features, integrating directly into Zend Studio being the one that tipped the scale for me. Also, since it's developed by a commercial company, who are the creators of PHP, you have reasonable assurance that it will be around, used, and actively developed, as long as PHP exists - which isn't a guarantee you have with other frameworks.

There are even classes you can take and certifications you can get (which looks great on a resume).

So there are a lot of positive things about it.

With the amount of text to be translated, anything will help no matter how minor.

I'm making slow progress.

I have the authentication component working, and have set up the site's framework and database design.

The system isn't going to be all that great looking (I'm a programmer, not a designer) but here's a sneak preview:

It's still really early right now, but I'm making progress.

Ideas, suggestions, requests?

Honestly the look of it is just fine. A suggestion would be to have the ability to either sort the replies by date (which seems to be the case in the image) or have the option to sort them by rating. Or at the very least have the highest rated one featured somewhere at the top.

Currently proposed translations are sorted by date.

I was debating about whether or not to sort them by rating, since earlier submissions could be higher rated by virtue of their age, hiding newer, potentially more accurate, translations at the bottom of the page.

I'll probably add a toggle button or some such, allowing people to change it themselves.

Along those lines - I'm trying to think about how this will be used in practice. Someone submits a translation, it's okay, but not perfect, it gets voted up. Then someone submits a new, more accurate, translation. The more accurate one is rated at 0 initially, while the old one which everyone knows is not 100% accurate is rated higher.

Now, people can vote 1 per day per translation. So they are able to vote up a new, more accurate translation, and vote down an older translation that they had previously voted up (basically allowing them to reverse their endorsement for the old one).

I'm hoping that this will be balanced, and work out well.

Basically once a translation stabilizes (i.e. it's highly rated, and there are no more new submissions), then I'll review the highest rated translation, make my assessment, come up with the very final translation, and "close" that piece of text, marking my final translation.

Before that, though, what needs to be done first is get rid of all the gibberish text. There are 10,123 pieces of text in the system. A good number of them are gibberish that need to be filtered out. That's what those two arrow buttons in the upper right hand corner are for - the green up arrow means that the text is good Japanese, and the red down arrow means that the text is random gibberish characters.

So I'm going to need people to go through every piece of text in the system and vote up the Japanese text, and vote down the gibberish. I'll have to put together some kind of training document or something along those lines.

Sounds like you have everything sorted fairly well, actually. I can't think of anything to add to this.

Thanks.

I just hope people actually use it.

I can't go through 10,123 lines of source text all by myself, and I certainly can't translate anything but rudimentary Japanese.

I have a few friends that can hold their own in the language, so I'll be pestering them a good bit once this goes live.

Awesome.

Thanks. ^_^

The system is ready for testing.

If anyone wants to volunteer, send me a PM.

Not much to say, other than here’s the link:

http://rpgt4.thutmosesworkshop.com/

I cut back a lot on the number of features I wanted to include, just because I don't have much time to actually work on this and I want to get something up and running right away, rather than have this join Kupid 2.0 on the dust-heap of half finished projects.

It was put together basically in 4 days, so it’s not terribly well polished right now. I also didn't bother putting it through extensive testing.

You can create an account there - if/when you do, let me know that you want to contribute to this project via email or PM and I will activate your account if I approve. Until your account is activated, you can't really do anything but look around.

If you have any ideas, suggestions, encounter any bugs/crashes/etc. do let me know.

Here's some notes Thutmose gave me in the chat:

What do we do if we see a clearly readable sentence, but it's in English?
Mose: That that's because I already translated it. Vote it up and I'll add in the necessary stuff later.

What about text like "IE2SUMMON2S_20.STR"?
Mose: They are file names. Vote it up so I can see it.

I've added the check-boxes you requested. Should be a bit faster to go through all that gibberish text.

FYI, I went from Page 40 to Page 165 this morning. That means I went through the rest of the 3000 entries in the database myself.

Mose, can you tell these people (and myself) my DB votes?

Regardless, this means that the database now has mainly Japanese in it. The junk has been cleared. I'm hoping some people step up to translate now that the heavy lifting is done.

All the gibberish you down-voted is now cleared out.

Mostly all that's left in the database now is Japanese and my translations.

Ix has a total of 4,558 votes in the RPGT4 Translation Database.

I was talking to Ix last night.

After looking through whats left in here, I can tell you that in its current state this project will never be finished. There's still a LOT of untranslatable junk in here, on top of what seems to be kanji selection cells that are also not translatable.

To be frank, there's a hugely disproportionate amount of sh*t in here that can't or won't ever be translated.

Have fun.

You're not telling me anything that I don't already know.

Thanks for volunteering to help, giving constructive feedback, making suggestions, otherwise contributing to this effort, and/or at least wishing me well in this endeavor.