Can your German GMs throw a thread up in the GM forum explaining to USA GMs how and what to do to improve our commentary...at this point our commentary is so old and stale I might just watch games in German.
Because all your german GMs are doing is changing translations of the ENGLISH from the ORIGINAL game, IE USAs commentary. You are not adding anything new, just messing with wording...IF USA changed its wording, then every nation in the world suddenly gets a message that they have to retranslate, and it woudl not be an LA to do it...not sure if even GMs have access...I think it would have to be a BB to change the original ENglish tag.
If people are sick of the wording 'jumpshot' and they change it to 'jumper'.....then eventually people will just get sick of the word jumper.The idea is not to simply reword, the idea is to leave the wordings that are there, there, but to add OTHER wordings AS WELL to add flavor and variety. The idea is that we want more variety/play types etc...We aren't gonna get a new GE with new types of events, so they would need to make different wordings for the same types of events so that they seem different. I think there is already several kinds of events that can just be worded differently in the viewer...So what we ARE asking for (I think atleast) is a game viewer update, which could only be done by the BBs, where they actually add new texts. If this were done, all the LAs would get new tags in their queue to translate. I was an LA for several seasons and personally finished the Japanese translation (although I did not do the bulk of the work, I did a few thousand tags at the end so that finally the game could be released in japanese)...Anyway The point is I know what I am talking about and Will obviously does not.
Well with your work experience I think you understand the whole issue better than me.THe English is the 'official' version. For translation, for the LAs, we see the English, and we have an editable field for each localization. You are correct they could make (may have) a seperate localization for American English which would be seperate from the base verbage...but I think this would make things more complicated. As you state, there are keys. I think the American English is then the 'default' or 'master' or something along those lines...the key point being that only BBs (and maybe some special GMs for all I know) can ever edit it. It is the official and in case of rule confusions etc., the translations/localization wording does not count, everything goes back to the core US English, hence why all GMs and LAs must speak English fluently.I guess its kinda like when the French ran England and all official laws were French/Latin.Maybe they should hire you to do a viewer update. Sounds like you got the experience and so forth. Maybe they could offer you a few seasons/years of supporter in lew of your work if they are too broke to give you cash for it. I guess it depends on how developer friendly the code for the viewer is. To me adding a few extra keys, a few lines of text, and some kind of functionality to randomly interpret a given event (which would be what the viewer reads from the GE) in multiple different ways, doesn'T sound too complicated...but then again maybe its a lot more complicated and time consuming than I imagine.