Free Beta Access for Translators

It's very important to me that my mods are accessible to as many people as possible, and I'm proud to say that Language Barriers is currently available in 12 of the 17 languages that The Sims 4 supports. This would not be possible without the help of my amazing translators, and I am very thankful for the generous use of their time and skills.

To my translators

I know that translating is no easy task, and I am very appreciative of the time you spend doing it. So, if you plan on translating the new text in Language Barriers v2.0, I want to offer you free early access when the beta phase begins. This should be sometime in mid/late July – I will make an announcement on Twitter, Discord, and Patreon when the time comes. When I do, all you have to do is DM me on Discord and ask for your copy of LB v2.0, and I will send it to you.

Why beta, and not alpha?

Alphas are something that I never even planned on sharing in the first place, since they are unfinished, prone to have more bugs, and highly subject to change. The only reason I have decided to make alpha releases at all is to be more transparent about my development progress, and as an extra "thank you" for my higher tier patrons.

As such, alpha releases are not ready to be translated, since their strings are not final. I may change the strings at any point throughout the alpha stage, and since I use a custom program to generate my tunings for some parts of the mod, the hashes for these strings may change as well. If you translate an alpha version, all of your hard work may be for nothing.

During the beta phase, the only changes that may be made to strings are fixing typos in English - and at that point, I will not be re-hashing the strings, so translations will be stable. This is why I am waiting to give translators access to the betas rather than the alphas.

Eligibility

The quality of my mods' translations is of utmost importance. Therefore, I want to ensure that this offer is not abused by anyone pretending to be a translator just to gain early access for free, and subsequently providing a low-quality or fake translation, or no translation at all.

If I personally know you, or if your name appears in the translation credits for any mod on my website, you are automatically eligible. 

If I do not know you, and you have never translated for me before, you must meet all of the following criteria to get free early access:

• You fluently speak Swedish, Danish, or Finnish*
• You know how to translate mods without any help from me
• You promise to translate all of the text in LB v2.0 to one or more of the above languages
• You can show me that you're a legitimate translator (e.g. a modder/translator/other member of the modding community who I know and trust can vouch for you, or you have a website/blog dedicated to mod translations that is older than this announcement)

* = More languages may be added to this list if my existing translators for them do not plan on translating v2.0. I will only accept one new translator per language, and each one will be chosen on a first-come, first-serve basis. The translators for Norwegian and Czech have already been selected, so those languages have been removed from the list.