Translator Stamps – A well deserved Reward

Slowly Translator Stamps

Those are well deserved Reward for the many volunteer Translators, who put their time and effort into creating local language versions of Slowly for their country's users.

And a RARE stamp 'treat' in the wild! (as so few people possess them, and are able to send in letters)

The source or Canonical Language

Slowly's Development is done in a bilingual way — both English and Chinese are used. English because it's the modern 'Lingua Franca', the current International language we might find most useful in connecting to other people's. (like what Latin and Greek used to be in Antiquity).

Mandarin Chinese as Hong Kong is home to the company, and I imagine most staff are fluent, native speakers.

However, Slowly's in app language has been broadening — with the help of many volunteer Translators who contributed to making new idioms possible.

In a Thank You gesture, the Team recognizes the Translators with Credits in their website and in app links. And also, an exclusive Stamp for people that contribute to any specific language translation effort.

I have offered to help a bit and review one of the languages, which I am fluent in and enjoy writing in. Have been accepted and now am working thorough it. And my. It is a LOT of work, as there is a large number of expressions that need to be carefully converted.

Translator Stamps – Rare and exclusive

At first, they were only awarded for the small number of people who are part of the teams. For a short time, Slowly Stories editors were accepting user submitted translations for a particular story, and also giving the contributing user a Translator stamp.

But soon people started chasing these stamps — creating a Story translation is a much easier and shorter task, in comparison to the effort of creating a full app new supported language.

Stamp collectors can be a determined bunch. After one of our sub members wrote a topic here detailing this possibility, soon a flood of new Stories translations were arriving at Slowly HQ; and some of them were sloppily done — maybe via Machine translation, simply to get one of these rare stamps. (thanks Draculalien for this topic)

As you can imagine, that was not well received — by readers which had low quality versions of sometimes wonderful pieces of writing in their own languages. And by Slowly, who were dismayed by the drop in quality. The offer of the Stamp reward was soon cancelled. (thanks to lessonwang for this topic)

How many are there ?

Good question. A friend's vast collection, where I took a snapshot for this post shows 20 of them (with 18 in the snapshot above, to make a nice rectangular shot). And he seems to have the most, I think. Impressive, considering how RARE many of those are. Well done, friend!

Some Translator languages had teams working on them, so there might be more than one recipient of the stamp, and a better chance to get one of these in circulation.

Some other languages were done by a single person — amazing as it's a lot of time and effort. And I have noticed also that some of those hard working people even did more than one Language. Wow. Thank you!

How do you get one of those for your own Collection ?

You would need to be pen friends with one of the original owners. And some of them are not interested in simply accepting all kinds of stamp lovers who might knock at their inboxes, lol. 😉😎

For now, some of the language translator stamps are not available in general, as their owners got tired of these requests, and might not be responding to friend requests at all.

That makes their stamps Unicorns, impossible to get and a legend. Example? The never-seen-in-the-wild Dutch Translator stamp. 😜

Sometimes, someone will post a topic mentioning they have one, or someone comments and mentions it too. But being RARE, they have high trade value, as you can imagine! 👍✨

Ah — contributing to a new language translation project not only supports Slowly and helps your fellow users, but might score you one of these, and a valuable trade chip. 😀

And were we go from here?

I don't know. It's interesting to know some details about these and other stamps, and I thought of creating this post and sharing a bit of info.

Right now, these are even more Rare than the famous 'Hello Kitty' stamps, which are legendary in their scarceness.

And as this, a Topic originally posted at Reddit developed more, it became this Blog page.

The numbers on the Slowly Translation Project :

Source language: English

And some of the many Languages already being worked on.

And thanks to potallegta for the good question, I can add this :

What are those two percentages beneath each country flag?

They represent the degree of completion of that particular language's translation.

For example, in the English language (which is the canonical source, the master language) the numbers currently stand as :

Translated : 4,764 words (100%)

Approved : 4.696 words (98%)

Total : 4,764 words

So — even in the Master language we might see some 98% approved rate; this happens when new project strings are added and yet not Approved officially in the English language area.

Any comments or suggestions? please add a comment and share. Thank you!

Famous Last Words

Special thank you to all the folks behind the SLOWLY app.

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