An astounding thing happened while I was sleeping last night. We reached the stage where all translation strings (except for FAQs, which are handled separately) have been marked as updated! If I'm counting right, that's 3752 translation strings updated to match our terminology and our style. Almost all of them have been proof-read as well. There are still a few left that haven't, which I'm sure the copy editing team will get on soon. This means 4 things:
1. The team of people who have been working on this are completely and utterly awesome. I cannot express in words how floored I am by the work that they've done. Before we started, I'd had nightmare visions of spending 36 hours straight wrestling with the translation system to try to get things finished by Open Beta. Instead, we finish with almost 3 weeks to spare. Please, everyone join me in giving mad props to the site copy and copy editing teams!
2. This means that if you see any instances of "LiveJournal" or "Friends" or anything else that doesn't belong, then that means that it's a bug. For along time, when people have been asking, I've been saying "yeah, we know there are still a bunch of places like that; we'll get to it!" Now we've gone through the whole site, we should have fixed everything. I'd be surprised if there weren't a couple of instances that we've managed to miss though, most likely through text that's hard-coded into the system. If you spot anything that doesn't look right from here on in, please let me know. Comment here, or send me a message.
3. We need to figure out what to do now! If you want to take a break, then please do. You've earned it. However, since we have the time, I want to go back and try to polish everything up and make it all really really shiny. This is the sort of task that can never truly be finished. There are always bits of wording that can be improved, always ways to make things clearer or more concise. That's what I think we should aim for now.
So, site copy people, you now have carte blanche to go back through updated strings and be really really picky with them, and try to get them to be
just so. I'd suggest that the best way to do this would probably be to trawl around the site, and look for wordings that you don't think are as good as they could be, then use ?uselang=debug to find where they come from and then go in and edit them. If you prefer some other method, though, go with whatever works best for you.
When you update things, keep them marked as updated, but uncheck the "proofed" box, so the proof readers know they need proof reading again. Proof-readers, your job remains the same as ever.
4.
denise and I agree that everyone who's been involved in this herculean task deserves an invite code or two for their efforts. Go check your codes! If you haven't got any and you should, poke me and I'll go and nag Denise until she gives you some.
And finally, let me say "thank you!" again. You all rock my socks so damn much.