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The Growth of a Game is officially announcing the addition of translated articles to its list of resources. These translations can be accessed through links at the top of each original article or in the “Categories” section on the right-hand side (bottom for mobile devices) of the page.
Ever since The Growth of a Game first launched, we’ve had ongoing internal discussions about the value of providing translated articles to our community. It may seem like an obvious thing to provide since our audience is so diverse and the level of English can vary heavily by region, however we were concerned at first that this would potentially segregate our audience in some way.
By providing translated articles, we risked the possibility of dividing the dialogue within our community, which ran contradictory to our goal of uniting American football advocates across Europe. Our aim has always been to address the things that we have in common rather than identifying the things that make us different. Our concern was that we would be dividing our audience in some capacity, so we began looking into potential ways to prevent this from happening while simultaneously benefiting from the opportunity of reaching a larger audience.
We agreed that the value of offering translations was too great to ignore, since it would enable us to expand our community even further and allow us share the knowledge and resources that we’ve developed with a broader audience. Regardless of whether we wanted to unite everyone under a single language or not, we had to acknowledge the reality that there are large numbers of people who aren’t comfortable reading full articles in English. To ignore them would actually be contradictory to our goal as well.
Ultimately, we were able to implement a custom feature on The Growth of a Game website that consolidates the comments from all translated articles into the comment thread from the original article. That means that there will be one single comment thread for the article regardless of the language in which it is read. This way, the community dialogue will continue to remain open, intercultural, and international. We’re really excited to be adding this feature, as it prevents any division within our audience and allows us to build a more diverse, informed community of American football advocates.
Translations won’t be provided for every article at the beginning, however our ultimate goal is to provide translations for every article in as many languages as possible. As our staff continues to grow and we bring on more translators, the variety of languages offered will continue to increase. At first, there will be an emphasis on providing translations for the “Top 10 Articles” that you see at the bottom of the page, which we’ve found to be some of the most valuable resources we’ve created thus far. The translations will be produced in the best quality possible, by those with extensive experience translating content from English into their native languages. In this manner, automatic translations from plugins such as Google Translate were simply not an option. At no point will we ever settle for producing second-tier content, so all translated articles will be completed manually by our staff. This ensures that you’ll have the best quality articles translated for you by a native speaker of your preferred language. For most of you who already read the articles in their original format, nothing will change. Since we are an open and mutually invested community, we always promise to share any major developments with our readers. We also encourage your continued dialogue on which languages you’d like to see on The Growth of a Game.
As time goes on, this will become a more refined process and we will continue to build a full repertoire of translations. As always, we’re focused on providing valuable information and resources to American football enthusiasts from every corner of Europe, and we hope this step will allow us to stretch several linguistic boundaries so that we can continue developing American football as one community. We may come from different cultures or speak different languages, but we all have the same goal: to improve the quality and awareness of American football throughout Europe.
If you have any thoughts or suggestions, please let us know in the comments section below.
