Hello,
Thank you for the effort you have put into reaching out and sharing your concerns! We take your feedback seriously and hope that you’ll feel satisfied with our response.
We're sorry for the delays in getting this project back up and running - we understand if this has made you concerned about the future of translations, but we're adamant to get this up and running very soon. As a bit of insight, we've just finished teaching our Team Leads and are ready to move forward in the future. We're excited to see you guys with us!
Our revamp is a rather vital change in the climate of our team. Access to a lot of important information was blocked by the time constraints on our volunteers. We wanted to make all of this manageable so that we can expand the team and make the network as accessible as possible going forward!
The Translation Team is led mainly by volunteers, who have taken the initiative to manage and revamp a team composed of hundreds of individuals and tens of languages. We are extremely thankful for the tireless work they have done for the team. Regardless of the poor old Translation Team state holding us back, Heads had ensured that the changes that were necessary for the Translation Team to thrive were done.
- We have made guidelines for our entire Translation Team to be accessible at any time.
- While working on this future, the old team was still performing - there was a fun environment and over 100,000 translations were released before we had to stop all translation work due to revamping the translation process.
- Regardless of having no communication bridges, which brought flaws in our communication, we managed to:
- Reach out to everyone with massive presentations about the future.
- Seek and hear everyone’s opinions and concerns.
- Always be there to guide, advise and support team members.
Our Heads Team has a
strongly collaborative work style, decisions are made quickly enough to support our large workload and fully together as a Heads Team. We never hide reasons for our decisions and recruitment is no exception.
We want to delve further into the specific concerns that you have on the thread. We appreciate you bringing these issues to light - self reflection is often difficult to do when under pressure, and we're sorry that these issues may have adversely affected your impression of our team. We'll go into detail to certain aspects of the concerns you have had nevertheless.
Head of Team Promotions
Head of Team is a voluntary position that you obtain by going through a thorough recruitment process and after displaying desired leadership traits. As Heads & Recruiters, it is up to us to decide whether the applications are external or internal to our team members and what training would be required, similar to other job positions within CubeCraft, such as Deputy Admin.
We want to talk about four specific people mentioned in the thread, Bean, Riley, Lozora and Axyy. All four have given consent to be talked about here, and we are thankful for this.
Head of Events - Bean:
When considering the Head of Events role, there are a few aspects that we must consider. What it takes to be able to motivate teams & host events:
- Having leadership knowledge and/or experience
- Having positive attitude and maturity
- Being able to turn our translator's suggestions for events into reality!
- Experience in coordinating events in the past is a plus, but not required.
When considering Bean for the Head of Events position, there were multiple notable qualities that we were able to point out. This includes:
- Leadership knowledge and experience seen in our careful recruitment process
- Blatant positive attitude and maturity shown in team participation and recruitment
- Blatant ability to take criticism, seen not only in recruitment, but through situations that have occurred within the team
- Creative mindset - they did amazing for the time they were here and are also now a Designer too!
- Exceptional language capabilities - English & Dutch
- Aspiring proofreader in real life and interested in Translation Team
We had noticed a very similar list of traits when looking at Riley. However, something that was slightly offputting was their pattern of negative team interactions and defensiveness. While we felt like this was something that could be improved on in the future, at the time, we believed that for this reason, Bean was the suitable choice.
As time went on, it served as a lesson to Riley eventually - they showed clear signs of self development and reflection, and thus, they were given a second chance once Bean moved to another position, regardless of not much time having passed since those aforementioned negative interactions. This decision was made collectively by Elenahh and Keanu as the Heads Team did not exist then, and so, recruitment was relatively quick.
Head of Communication & Recruitment - Lozora:
Similar to our discussion on the Head of Events, we'd like to list a few qualities for the Head of Recruitment role:
- Must have some leadership knowledge and/or experience
- Having positive attitude, enthusiasm & maturity
- Bonuses include:
- Any Translation Team experience
- Be a moderator - access to moderation tools & experience. We did not make this a requirement as we wanted the head to be as well suited to the role as possible, which often did not include the staff team.
After receiving applications from both moderators and non-moderators, we had gone on with our recruitment process as usual. After the interview process, we felt like
Axyy and
Lozora were the top choices for the roles for Communication and Recruitment, and we saw them as voluntary leaders.
We chose Axyy for Head of Recruitment due to their experiences in recruitment and translations, as portrayed through their years of experience translating and proofreading for Mojang. We chose Lozora for Communication Head after going through training as we had applications for Head of Communications open in the past, but all candidates that were not chosen had a valid reason for denial. Lozora did not have any worrying flaws, which is why we decided to give him a chance.
When Axyy resigned from his positions as Recruitment Head, Lozora was the one to take this position because he was much more strongly passionate about Recruitment than Communication. Furthermore, as he had already undergone training, making the transition was far easier than opening applications up again, interviewing and training, which could take a while to get up to speed. As our revamp was in full swing, this seemed like the most logical thing to do.
Proofreader - Axyy:
After resigning as a Head of Team, Axyy wanted to stay as either Translator/Proofreader. Considering their years of proofreader experience for Mojang, of which they provided evidence for, we decided to give a shot regardless of mistakes made long in the past. No harm can be done by giving our volunteers a chance - translations rely on teamwork, working with proofreaders could have led to either enough improvement being achieved or to them returning to the translator team.
After discussions were had in the Dutch Proofreader chat, it allowed us to reflect on this decision made. We did not intend any harm and are sorry for you feeling frustrated over our speed of decision. We want to involve you in these decisions, and we're sorry that you weren't with this one. We are happy to talk about promotions with other proofreaders going forward, as we understand a decision made under the radar was not what you want to hear when working as a team.
A Comment on Recruitment
A lot of our recruitment is based off of
trust - our Heads Team and Team Leads cannot speak 30+ languages, so we must ensure that the people we are recruiting are trustworthy volunteers. This trust is gained through their interactions within CubeCraft as a whole, their efforts in the translation team and their responses to feedback about their translations.
Report Translators are there to assist our moderation team only - our network is comprised of a plethora of different languages, so supporting our players and ensuring their safety no matter the language is paramount for a good player experience! No exceptional translation skills required, only general fluency in the language is needed. This could help them in the future if we decide to open applications for a smaller language such that they can develop the necessary skills to pursue it successfully. We also keep an archive of all translations and translators in case of issues occurring in the future. We let a few users in that got verified by Proofreaders & Recruiters, whom of which are trustworthy community members, are enthusiastic to help, and can be very beneficial to Moderation Team in the future.
In essence, our entire team is built upon trust; from the Team Leads to the Translators, we are able to put trust into our team to deliver the highest quality translations. To do this efficiently, Team Leads may be inclined to verify someone's ability to translate and invite them onto the team to test their capabilities in a rather quick manner.
If you feel like you have been treated unfairly within recruitment, we are willing to listen to your concerns! We're more than happy to give you the truth behind our decisions.
The Translation Team Revamp
Now we want to take our time to address specific aspects about our revamp that has caused some tension around the community.
Application Closure - Why?
- Recruitment was undergoing massive corrections - we have planned a new way to recruit such that those applying and dealing with applications will not be overwhelmed.
- Bringing new people to a chaos, only means more chaos - we had no established internal team structure, no guidelines, without the new recruitment system could have gotten overpopulated or brought lower quality volunteers.
- Everything is strongly connected - without guidelines, proofreaders and recruiters do not know how to handle recruitment, without a finished team structure we cannot give transparency to candidates what the team is like internally. We're wanting to bridge as many sectors of the translation team as possible so knowing who to talk to isn't a struggle!
- Our project had a very strict order that needed to be followed, almost no contents could have been released without others. As we begin to finish our last parts of the project, we're able to be more open about these processes and what they may look like going forward.
Flawed Communication - Where were our updates?
- Some weight is better off spared - Heads are here to bear it for you, transfer you the useful information only - future goals, cool features, training, etc, or the one you request. Not everything is vital to know.
- Translation Team was overwhelmed with chaos enough, had no communication bridges
- Could have easily had the case worsened by sharing every detail behind the scenes
- We decided not to focus on sharing every detail and only share useful and requested information. While this meant that the team was under the impression that no work was done, our volunteers were, and still are working tirelessly to get the revamp out.
We're sorry that there was a lack of communication regarding our progress of the revamp. As it was a large undertaking, we definitely had some initial problems with understanding the scale of the project, however now that we have an end goal in sight, we are able to get the revamp out as soon as possible. We don't want to commit to specific dates as we want to ensure the quality is there, but we also don't want to repeat the same mistakes as we have before.
Translator Staff - Quantity over Quality?
Finally, we'd like to address the translator staff debate, as mentioned earlier this year, and now.
As a team, we're always been striving towards balancing both
quality (true, long term dedication, maturity, outstanding language capabilities) and
quantity (time and experience). The imperfections of balancing these two within larger teams only, was due to the old Translation Team state.
To understand the reasoning for recruiting translator staff, you may be interested to know we do in this process. To put into perspective, it is not as simple or straight forward as recruiting translation team members.
- There are multiple factors that we need to consider - interaction on the server and our network as a whole being a major aspect, as you are now representing CubeCraft as a whole.
- To ensure that this is met, no translator staff is recruited without discussion with other Heads, as well as a short interview to ensure the quality is there.
- There are more responsibilities for other members, especially within the revamp. This should provide some better structure to these decisions, but we still are striving for the long term commitment and the strong quality of translations. If you have any questions regarding this, we'd be happy to answer.
Closing Notes - A glimpse into the future
Going forward, our brand new Translation Team, has a ton of implemented improvements and future ambitions. This is including but not limited to:
- Everything new is accessible by the team and meetings are planned to share even more.
- Guides, events, suggestions, memories, and all will be in a centralised board for all Translators.
- Each subdivision of Translator teams will have access to specific guides for that sector to help accomplish our roles.
- Better communication from the top down.
- Applications are reopening - with a new and more efficient format.
- An overall enjoyable outlook into the future of Translations on CubeCraft!
Again, we apologise for the wait for this, we definitely did not want to wait a long time, however as you may understand, curating a simple answer for this thread is not possible, and we wanted to address these in as much detail as possible to avoid confusion.
We'll be closing this thread now since we have addressed all that we can. If you have any other concerns or feedback, don't hesitate to create a staff feedback thread - a public thread has only added pressure to address these issues head on, and moving forward, we would have loved to give a more detailed and concise response, as well as discuss measures for the issues to ensure they won't happen again. However we are operating on borrowed time here, and while we would have loved to prove ourselves with the coming changes, a response here was simply necessary on our part.
Thank you once again, we apologise for the inconveniences and would love to hear any future suggestions and concerns about either our present or future!
- Heads Team