Hey, welcome to this thread in which a number of people (including me) are questioning the Translations Team's policies and actions.
Let me start by introducing myself. I am Remi, I’m from the Netherlands and have been on the team for about 2.5 years, being 1 of the first to enter the team. I have had several roles on the team, including Translator, Proofreader, Mentor Coordinator and Events Coordinator. So I have quite a lot of experience and have also seen all the developments around the team up close. This has led me to the conclusion that the team is on a downward spiral with no end in sight. With this thread, I hope to be able to achieve changes that can make the team feel more like a cozy community again where everyone has the same opportunities and no people are favored based on their position within CubeCraft in general rather than the Translations Team.
I would also like to introduce myself. I’m Tex, I’m also from The Netherlands and I’ve been in the team for more than a year now. I don’t have a resume quite as big as Remi’s, but I’ve been a Translator and I currently still am a Dutch proofreader. I was a mentor for the Dutch and the Chinese team for more than half a year as well, but for reasons surrounding the revamp, the mentor team was removed entirely.
Keep in mind that this is not a witch hunt in which the leaders of the team are to be assailed; it is meant only as criticism directed towards a team that I myself have put a lot of effort into and care about. I see a lot going wrong in the team and a lot of mistakes being made around policies that I think could be much better. A few months ago we brought up some issues and then we called as a team and talked through the issues. I have to say that this was quite a success, as we had come to a reasonable agreement on most issues and have been promised improvement on several. Examples of things we discussed in the call are nepotism (mentioned in this thread using the word "favoritism") - also known as favoring certain members with higher positions within CubeCraft who (in some cases) don't do their job properly, the poor connection between the Heads and the community, smaller teams that were going to be removed (solved) and the sluggish developments around the mostly adulated revamp, which roughly speaking should have been finished a year ago.
In this thread we want to discuss a number of things. It will cover topics regarding favoritism within the team, bans of members without good reason, the Translator Rank and more. In this thread, some people will be mentioned by name, but keep in mind that in a number of cases it is not about the person themselves, but the decision surrounding the promotion/assignment of roles to that person. (We’ve made precautions by explaining why they were mentioned down here, on the thread, and in their DMs.) Discussing this, we will be using character traits, skills, evidence and more to support the criticism.
We hope the purpose of this thread is a little clearer after this disclaimer.
TL;DR: It's not a witch hunt, it's generally a criticism against the team’s policy.
Why aren’t we discussing this in the team?
We have, again and again, made documents and whole sheets of text on how to improve the team and our personal criticisms against it, but now that Remi is banned and after about 3 meetings that resulted to nothing, we’re so done with trying to reach the Team Leads. They simply won’t respond or take what we have to say into consideration. I have to give them slack, obviously they have listened to us a whole bunch of times but they’re just so scared of change and to listen to their community. That is why we’re making this thread. We hope to gain some traction by talking about the team outside of the Translation Team.
Favoritism
First of all, we are aware that this is a pretty big claim to make, but we feel like enough has happened to name this point in this thread. In this case, it is primarily about favoritism between staff members of CubeCraft who have an obvious higher chance of being assigned to certain roles and positions.
Lozora’s promotion to Communication Head
Examples include the promotion of Lozora and Axyy to Team Head without the former having any kind of experience on the team (but becoming Communications Head - a role that is very important in terms of communicating and hearing+rebuttal with regards to the community) and thus being promoted from the Guest role (the lowest, with no duties/obligations) with 704 posts in about 7 months. That's not nearly enough to become part of a community - let alone become Communications Head to represent the community, so to speak, and be there for them in certain situations. This was a very questionable decision as there were a number of community members with more experience on the team who were passed over to help a 'rookie' get a higher position. This is a perfect example of how disconnected the Heads of the team actually are from the community. It is a form of nepotism that will be denied by the Heads here, but what else would you call it? A person with 0 experience is promoted because he had 'successfully completed all training' (incredibly bad argument, as in that case, even my house spiders could finish the training and be assigned to that role) and the Heads already knew him - thus knew about his 'qualities'. Utterly ridiculous; this is unbelievable preferential treatment since out of all possible candidates an - with all due respect - inexperienced person was chosen with the guest role, whose Translator test was rejected and knew nothing about the team before his promotion to the Heads role. Why didn’t you choose an experienced person who has a backbone instead of avoiding discussions with members (I'll return to this later), knows how everything works and is already integrated into the Translations Team community, allowing his tasks to be performed immediately by a respected member of the community? This is obvious mismanagement because the Heads apparently prefer known, incompetent people in the Heads Team to an integrated, respected member who cares about the community and knows what’s up.
Axyy’s promotion to Proofreader
Enough about Lozora's promotion (we'll come back to a similar situation with him in the lead later), let's move on to Axyy's questionable promotion to Proofreader. A few days ago, after disregarding the duties of being Head (FYI: He had a good reason, we’re not bashing him, nor the team for that), Axyy was promoted to Proofreader by the Heads. I don't know whose ridiculous idea this was, but I hold the Heads team as a whole responsible. First of all, I want to start by saying that I have nothing against Axyy personally, as I don't know him as a person. You’re probably a nice guy - so nothing personal here - but it’s merely about the decision itself. Anyhow, I do know about his translation skills through 2 tests and I know better than anyone how high the bar is in the Dutch team; we’ve had to reject a huge number of reasonable Translator candidates, simply because the rest had a higher level. The test is so hard that we’ve had to throw out people for even the smallest mistakes. If you want to aim for such a high level as a team, you’ll have to make sure that your Proofreaders (the people who check all translations for quality, make sure errors are ironed out, etc.) are of an even higher level than the Translators. That being said, Axyy has been a Proofreader at Mojang for a while, which should guarantee quality. Although I can't judge his work at Mojang, I did help judge his tests twice; he failed the first time and was narrowly accepted the second time. By way of comparison, I've looked at tests from a number of Proofreaders, whose tests had an average of about 6 errors per test. Axyy had 37 errors on his first test and even 50(!) errors on his second test. The reason he was accepted after the second test was because the errors there were less critical than those on the first test, but I think we can conclude that this is definitely not Proofreader material. The most ridiculous thing of all is that before Elena helped him into the Proofreader role, he was not even tested. Every Proofreader (on the Dutch team, at least) has made a test to see if his/her skills are at a good level, but apparently (ex-)Mods get more credit and are automatically great at their language...? Furthermore, no Translators have been informed about the fact that team Dutch needed a Proofreader, while there are certainly better Translators in the Dutch team, who were not even given the chance to get a spot on the Proofreader team. This is another example of pure favouritism; the Heads can't even speak Dutch (or haven't completed their test properly) but apparently can decide who is good enough at a language to become a Proofreader?
There was also a discussion about Axyy’s promotion to Proofreader, which shows the ridiculous reasoning of the Heads.
A big mistake is made here: Translating in Minecraft is basically just translating words, since there are hardly any sentences in the game. The two tests have shown that when it comes to sentences, he just doesn’t possess sufficient knowledge to successfully translate these sentences into the right meaning. It irritates me greatly that an ex-Head who clearly does not have the qualities to become a Proofreader (or at least has not shown this) and was actually greatly flattered by being given the promotion to Translator is put forward by the Heads team who are clearly unaware of the facts, while other Dutch Translators are not even given the chance to show themselves. It was not even shared that Proofreaders were needed. It was promised that there would be improvement in terms of communication, but this is far from being the case.
This problem was also discussed in the Team Leads channel, where it was dismissed as a quick fix due to lack of time. Sorry? It takes maybe 2 to 3 days in total to get someone promoted to Proofreader - if not less. 1 day for someone to take the test, 1 day to proofread, that's it. But still, it has to be done so quickly that mediocre quality is chosen instead of tested, good quality? I didn't notice anything like that with the Revamp, but we'll come back to that later. When the team was in its best days (in my opinion), the motto was quality over quantity, but that doesn't seem to be the case anymore.
EDIT
We've received a lot of messages regarding this thread and one in particular has lead us to the conclusion that the decisions resulting in Axyy's promotion to Head of the team had more flaws than we could've imagined.
On top of the things that we mentioned before, there's something else that we'd like to add.
Let's keep it short: The applications were supposed to close on December 31st, whilst Axyy was promoted on December 27th. Screenshots in the spoiler below. As you can see, the applications were closed sooner than they originally told us they would, which might've excluded some members. Then Eli mentions that, if you'd still like to apply, you should do so in the following day or two. However, Axyy received his promotion on the very same day as Eli's message..?
You didn't even give people the time to adapt to the changed dates and altered them out of nowhere, and you didn't give the community 2 more days like you promised.
This means that you had already done the interviews before the applications even closed, and didn't give the rest of the applicants that still wanted to apply a chance, as you'd already selected your winning candidate. It gives the image that you were waiting for him to apply and give him the interview+the role immediately, and then closed the applications. We aren't saying this is our final verdict and that this is 100% true. We're just saying that it really seems like this.
Lozora’s promotion to Recruitment Head
Let's move on to Lozora, since he has been assigned a higher position more often than once, 1 of which was quite recently. Axyy stopped being Recruitment Head and almost immediately Lozora was put forward again and stopped being Communication Head, to replace Axyy. How does this work? First of all, a large number of experienced Translators are denied the Communication role because an inexperienced person had to be hired so badly and now he is putting those duties aside and being helped to a new role? I don’t know whether this was his own decision, so I consider this to be decided by the entire Heads Team. And all this happened without applications, since the community here has also not been given a chance to get a spot on the Heads Team. This is another huge example of the unprecedented favoritism within the team. Don't you understand that it's incredibly discouraging if you, as a member of the team, would like to do more for the team, but the distribution of roles most of the time is in favor of acquaintances of the Heads? Probably this part will also be brushed off as a quick fix due to the lack of time, whilst in fact this is a mistake by the Heads team, which has resulted in disadvantaging the community as they have been denied yet another opportunity to hold a higher position within the team. You turn your own problem - apparently time is quite a thing for the Heads Team - into the community's problem, since they are not offered the same opportunities as acquaintances of the Heads Team.
Another example
Furthermore, this is certainly not the only case of Elena favouring people without experience. I can remember a case in the Events team where Bean (no offense, in the end you did well for the short time you led the Events team) was promoted to Events Head - with no experience whatsoever - while we as Events team had already decided it would be Riley. Absolutely no joke: Her primary main argument for this change was 'Simply because of her amazingness'. Ridiculous. Eventually, we got into a discussion with Elena after this, coming to the conclusion that we should just give her her time. Does that not sound familiar to you? In the cases of Lozora (and Axyy's promotion to Recruitment Head, different story around the time of Lozora's promotion) we also had to just give them their time to perform their functions. The example is a bit older, but is meant to show that this is not the first time that the Heads, including Elena with a large share, make these mistakes. That is the circle you then end up in, because acquaintances of hers without any credit whatsoever are given infinite credit by her, while others are given no opportunity at all.
EDIT
Another thing has recently come to our attention surrounding favoritism, namely that team heads and team leads now have the privilege to add anyone into the team as a (reports) translator. This is incredibly problematic and again- very frustrating to see because obviously anyone would want their friend to have a chance to join the team, and these hand picked people are now joining whilst others are denied the chance, without the use of any sort of application whatsoever.
At the moment, it is not about the quality of the translators, they have been tested and prepared for the work that they’ll need to be doing as a translator. What concerns us most is the way in which these translators are selected. Everyone would love to have a friend on the team but it doesn't work that way because everyone should have an equal chance. In this case, we do not know how good these people are or whether they would be better than others, but these 'others' did not even have a chance because no applications were used.
Let’s be realistic. These people were picked out to be on the team because these team leads and team heads knew them personally. Obviously they wouldn’t have gotten picked if nobody knew them, but the problem is more that others never even got the chance to apply. They’re picking these people over other people because they know them personally, this is the literal meaning of favoritism.
The team’s argument for this decision is because ‘we have big projects coming up and we could use more hands’. Again with the argument of ‘we’re incredibly busy and we don’t have enough time’. This argument is completely invalid in this case because the revamp has taken a year and there have been 2 different recruitment managers so far. Applications could have been open 8 months ago, but instead you decide to pick people out based on your own volition.
Revamp
The Revamp is one of those things where a lot has been promised by the Heads, but in the given time there are actually very few results. I will keep the beginning short; far too much time is spent on things that should not have taken so long at all.
Communication
I don't have a precise view behind the scenes, but I have enough people telling me things about what could be better in the team, and the revamp is a frequently mentioned topic among them. The reason for this is not necessarily that the revamp is a bad thing in itself; opinions are divided on the subject, so I won't dwell on it too much, except for one subject (which I think is quite important, since we're talking about a team). My main concern is the long time spent on this revamp, without any real verifiable progress (for a long time). There have been changes made around the team lately, but it's still not fully implemented. For example, the applications have not yet been opened, so the team has basically come to a standstill in terms of recreational communication. More on this in a moment, let's get to the main point first, before we move on to other points surrounding this revamp. The main points concerning the revamp are actually... a little unclear? A channel called #team-revamp was created in response to widespread criticism from team members and insistence, but it has already been removed while the revamp is still in progress. As a result, the community no longer gets a concrete picture of what the higher roles in the team are actually doing, because communication is stopped in this way. A new channel called #changelog has been created, so who knows, information about the revamp might still be shared there. But anyway, the point is that after certain agreements were made, these agreements are now actually being renegotiated...? The fact that you don't get a storm of criticism anymore doesn't mean that the sharing of information has to stop. It is certainly not the case that everything should be shared, but I do think that certain progress you have made should be shared. I think if you don't share anything with your community, you don't make enough relevant progress, right?
Revamp will probably outlast Queen Elizabeth
Now I can jump to the second topic of the revamp: the incredibly long wait. After much searching (we could not find the exact answer, probably the original channel was deleted or we overlooked the message), we came to the conclusion that the revamp was mentioned somewhere around March 2020. We even came across posts from February and before, but without sufficient context, we did not know if these were related to this revamp. Therefore, we are sticking with March 2020, but don't hesitate to correct me if this is incorrect - if the original date is before or maybe after that. Meanwhile, an entire year has gone by and the revamp is still not complete. Now it's very easy to use the arguments 'the Heads are people who make mistakes too' and 'the Heads deserve free time too', but it’s not that easy to get around. I would like to share that Elena gets paid to do her job, so the 'free time argument' applies here in a lesser form, since leading the team is her job. Anyway, first of all, Axyy's argument. Axyy, there has been quite a lot of criticism in this thread towards the decision to make you Proofreader, but I think you handled the following situation well. Something happened in your private life (we’re wishing you a lot of strength) and then you put aside your duties of being a Recruitment Head, because you felt the team deserved a Head who could give 100%. You deserve praise for that! I don't expect everyone on the Heads team to be able to give 100% for the team and I certainly don't expect the Heads team to spend all their free time on the team, but I do expect these people to be able to make themselves available to the extent that they can to really contribute. The Heads team itself will probably deny this, but this way it just looks like you are screwing around, doesn't it? Unbelievable, possibly more than a year spent on these changes. I remember a very long presentation by Elena around the summer, giving information about how the roles would be organised after the revamp. By then, the plans were already in place, so implementing them was a piece of cake, right? I remember that the original deadline was already before that presentation, but anyway. In the end, the deadline for the revamp came down to somewhere around the turn of the year and now we're still at it.
Of course, there are more changes involved than just the organisation of roles, such as the writing of guides (partly unnecessary in my opinion) and I am certainly not saying that it is all tremendously easy, but surely the desired changes should have been able to be implemented within.. let’s say a month or 2? After a lot of hard work and dedication, I believe this should have been possible. These are of course speculations and thoughts of a non-Head, but the point is clear; it has taken far too long. It is as if the way you defended yourself was all big talk, but the actual deeds took a long time to come.
Ruining your community
The long time that revamp has taken to be implemented (and still is taking) has had a negative effect on many things; that is a known fact. I think a very bad consequence of this situation is the death of the community. I mean it, it is dead. It has taken an incredibly long time until new Events Coordinators were hired (due to the Revamp) and in the meantime the community has been dying off in small steps at a time, while Jensieboy carried the Events Team on his back. No new people have entered the Translations Team, due to the closing of the applications, and therefore the community and the aforementioned recreational communication have come to a standstill. I don't think you realise what incredible opportunities you may have missed by closing the Translator applications for a year. Great, hard-working people have not been able to join the team because the Revamp is still going on. A real shame, as it was always great to see a mix of new, inexperienced Translators interacting with other experienced Translators who have been part of the community for some time. I understand that the applications had to be shut down for a while, but for so long? I don't think so.
Translator Rank
I (Remi) have written a thread about the Translator rank before, only part of the community disagreed with me. I think we still have a good point, maybe I could have phrased it better so we didn't end up in an endless discussion about the Designer rank. In order to avoid discussions about this rank, I would like to make it clear that I do not want to talk about this rank, because I do not have enough information to have a discussion or defend a position on this rank. I have never been a member of the Designer team, but I have seen (as Tex did) what the Translator rank has done to the team, so let's focus on that.
The big problem with the Translator rank is that it rewards quantity rather than quality, which is a problem in and of itself but this is besides the point. Because it only rewards quantity, a lot of members will try and claim as much work as possible for themselves whilst others are left with almost nothing to do, and this is a huge problem. We, as proofreaders, have had a lot of complaints about most members not getting any work at all and for this reason we, as the Dutch team, have had to split up the work evenly. This was a good fix. Everyone had something to do, but it soon raised another problem with the introduction of Translator rank, namely that none of the Dutch members have had the chance to truly show off their skills so there are NO Dutch translators or proofreaders that have the translator rank right now (that haven’t obtained it from being a manager/Head of team) even though the Dutch team is the biggest team.
Long story short, because Elena and none of the other managers/Team heads have any insight in any of the teams (because there’s such a big difference between a manager and a normal member) none of the Dutch team members have Translator. This is nothing except annoying and really backwards.
TL;DR/conclusion
Elena has a closed group of friends that run the Translation Team. In this article we take Lozora and Axyy as an example. They, amongst other people, got very major promotions out of nowhere, usually without applications for said positions ever being opened. This has led to much of the team being incredibly discouraged, jealous, and annoyed at the fact that Elena kind of just puts people in certain positions just because she knows them, it seems. Many people strive to one day become a PR or a Head of Team but Elena tends to just give promotions to her close friends within the translation team and it’s so blatant and heart wrenching to see how it’s virtually impossible for the normal member to get anywhere anymore with Elena being so incredibly closed up on who to even *give a chance*. For us, and many others, the team is kind of ruined. We still love the community and the translating work but it’d be nice if everyone got an equal chance at getting somewhere higher, and it’d be nice as well if Elena’s buddies were in the same boat as all of us.
Unkept promises. They are pretty common nowadays in the translation team. The revamp, for example, was promised to us to be “soon” multiple times. The first time they said the revamp would be out “soon” was about 5 months ago. We still don’t have any updates regarding the revamp at all. The team is still slowly dying because there haven’t been any new people joining in almost a year. It has descended to a few people still talking in there daily, but an active conversation in the team is very rare nowadays. Compare this to a year ago, when I, Tex, was accepted into the team as a trainee, and later became a translator. The team was so lively and fun to be in. Almost everyone talked in there, relationships were built, events were had, I remember talking in the off topic channel for hours on end just talking about stuff that didn’t matter to anyone, but I had the time of my life. It seems everyone just went their separate ways.
All in all we just want change. We want the old team back. We don’t want some people like Axyy and Lozora to have a much higher chance at stepping into a high position than the normal Translation Team member. We want the applications to be opened so more people can join and the older, inactive translators to be replaced with new faces. We want to do all the fun stuff like proofreading tests and translating whole excel sheets again, but nothing we do seems to reach the managers of the team, so that’s why we have made this thread. We hope to have been able to influence your views on the team slightly and we’ll have to keep hoping for change.
Credits
Thanks to @Texbirds for helping me write, think and a lot of other stuff
Thanks to @AlperenSV for helping me with ideas and evidence
And some others whose names I won't mention due to their role on the team!
Let me start by introducing myself. I am Remi, I’m from the Netherlands and have been on the team for about 2.5 years, being 1 of the first to enter the team. I have had several roles on the team, including Translator, Proofreader, Mentor Coordinator and Events Coordinator. So I have quite a lot of experience and have also seen all the developments around the team up close. This has led me to the conclusion that the team is on a downward spiral with no end in sight. With this thread, I hope to be able to achieve changes that can make the team feel more like a cozy community again where everyone has the same opportunities and no people are favored based on their position within CubeCraft in general rather than the Translations Team.
I would also like to introduce myself. I’m Tex, I’m also from The Netherlands and I’ve been in the team for more than a year now. I don’t have a resume quite as big as Remi’s, but I’ve been a Translator and I currently still am a Dutch proofreader. I was a mentor for the Dutch and the Chinese team for more than half a year as well, but for reasons surrounding the revamp, the mentor team was removed entirely.
Keep in mind that this is not a witch hunt in which the leaders of the team are to be assailed; it is meant only as criticism directed towards a team that I myself have put a lot of effort into and care about. I see a lot going wrong in the team and a lot of mistakes being made around policies that I think could be much better. A few months ago we brought up some issues and then we called as a team and talked through the issues. I have to say that this was quite a success, as we had come to a reasonable agreement on most issues and have been promised improvement on several. Examples of things we discussed in the call are nepotism (mentioned in this thread using the word "favoritism") - also known as favoring certain members with higher positions within CubeCraft who (in some cases) don't do their job properly, the poor connection between the Heads and the community, smaller teams that were going to be removed (solved) and the sluggish developments around the mostly adulated revamp, which roughly speaking should have been finished a year ago.
In this thread we want to discuss a number of things. It will cover topics regarding favoritism within the team, bans of members without good reason, the Translator Rank and more. In this thread, some people will be mentioned by name, but keep in mind that in a number of cases it is not about the person themselves, but the decision surrounding the promotion/assignment of roles to that person. (We’ve made precautions by explaining why they were mentioned down here, on the thread, and in their DMs.) Discussing this, we will be using character traits, skills, evidence and more to support the criticism.
We hope the purpose of this thread is a little clearer after this disclaimer.
TL;DR: It's not a witch hunt, it's generally a criticism against the team’s policy.
Why aren’t we discussing this in the team?
We have, again and again, made documents and whole sheets of text on how to improve the team and our personal criticisms against it, but now that Remi is banned and after about 3 meetings that resulted to nothing, we’re so done with trying to reach the Team Leads. They simply won’t respond or take what we have to say into consideration. I have to give them slack, obviously they have listened to us a whole bunch of times but they’re just so scared of change and to listen to their community. That is why we’re making this thread. We hope to gain some traction by talking about the team outside of the Translation Team.
Favoritism
First of all, we are aware that this is a pretty big claim to make, but we feel like enough has happened to name this point in this thread. In this case, it is primarily about favoritism between staff members of CubeCraft who have an obvious higher chance of being assigned to certain roles and positions.
Lozora’s promotion to Communication Head
Examples include the promotion of Lozora and Axyy to Team Head without the former having any kind of experience on the team (but becoming Communications Head - a role that is very important in terms of communicating and hearing+rebuttal with regards to the community) and thus being promoted from the Guest role (the lowest, with no duties/obligations) with 704 posts in about 7 months. That's not nearly enough to become part of a community - let alone become Communications Head to represent the community, so to speak, and be there for them in certain situations. This was a very questionable decision as there were a number of community members with more experience on the team who were passed over to help a 'rookie' get a higher position. This is a perfect example of how disconnected the Heads of the team actually are from the community. It is a form of nepotism that will be denied by the Heads here, but what else would you call it? A person with 0 experience is promoted because he had 'successfully completed all training' (incredibly bad argument, as in that case, even my house spiders could finish the training and be assigned to that role) and the Heads already knew him - thus knew about his 'qualities'. Utterly ridiculous; this is unbelievable preferential treatment since out of all possible candidates an - with all due respect - inexperienced person was chosen with the guest role, whose Translator test was rejected and knew nothing about the team before his promotion to the Heads role. Why didn’t you choose an experienced person who has a backbone instead of avoiding discussions with members (I'll return to this later), knows how everything works and is already integrated into the Translations Team community, allowing his tasks to be performed immediately by a respected member of the community? This is obvious mismanagement because the Heads apparently prefer known, incompetent people in the Heads Team to an integrated, respected member who cares about the community and knows what’s up.
Axyy’s promotion to Proofreader
Enough about Lozora's promotion (we'll come back to a similar situation with him in the lead later), let's move on to Axyy's questionable promotion to Proofreader. A few days ago, after disregarding the duties of being Head (FYI: He had a good reason, we’re not bashing him, nor the team for that), Axyy was promoted to Proofreader by the Heads. I don't know whose ridiculous idea this was, but I hold the Heads team as a whole responsible. First of all, I want to start by saying that I have nothing against Axyy personally, as I don't know him as a person. You’re probably a nice guy - so nothing personal here - but it’s merely about the decision itself. Anyhow, I do know about his translation skills through 2 tests and I know better than anyone how high the bar is in the Dutch team; we’ve had to reject a huge number of reasonable Translator candidates, simply because the rest had a higher level. The test is so hard that we’ve had to throw out people for even the smallest mistakes. If you want to aim for such a high level as a team, you’ll have to make sure that your Proofreaders (the people who check all translations for quality, make sure errors are ironed out, etc.) are of an even higher level than the Translators. That being said, Axyy has been a Proofreader at Mojang for a while, which should guarantee quality. Although I can't judge his work at Mojang, I did help judge his tests twice; he failed the first time and was narrowly accepted the second time. By way of comparison, I've looked at tests from a number of Proofreaders, whose tests had an average of about 6 errors per test. Axyy had 37 errors on his first test and even 50(!) errors on his second test. The reason he was accepted after the second test was because the errors there were less critical than those on the first test, but I think we can conclude that this is definitely not Proofreader material. The most ridiculous thing of all is that before Elena helped him into the Proofreader role, he was not even tested. Every Proofreader (on the Dutch team, at least) has made a test to see if his/her skills are at a good level, but apparently (ex-)Mods get more credit and are automatically great at their language...? Furthermore, no Translators have been informed about the fact that team Dutch needed a Proofreader, while there are certainly better Translators in the Dutch team, who were not even given the chance to get a spot on the Proofreader team. This is another example of pure favouritism; the Heads can't even speak Dutch (or haven't completed their test properly) but apparently can decide who is good enough at a language to become a Proofreader?
There was also a discussion about Axyy’s promotion to Proofreader, which shows the ridiculous reasoning of the Heads.
This problem was also discussed in the Team Leads channel, where it was dismissed as a quick fix due to lack of time. Sorry? It takes maybe 2 to 3 days in total to get someone promoted to Proofreader - if not less. 1 day for someone to take the test, 1 day to proofread, that's it. But still, it has to be done so quickly that mediocre quality is chosen instead of tested, good quality? I didn't notice anything like that with the Revamp, but we'll come back to that later. When the team was in its best days (in my opinion), the motto was quality over quantity, but that doesn't seem to be the case anymore.
EDIT
We've received a lot of messages regarding this thread and one in particular has lead us to the conclusion that the decisions resulting in Axyy's promotion to Head of the team had more flaws than we could've imagined.
On top of the things that we mentioned before, there's something else that we'd like to add.
Let's keep it short: The applications were supposed to close on December 31st, whilst Axyy was promoted on December 27th. Screenshots in the spoiler below. As you can see, the applications were closed sooner than they originally told us they would, which might've excluded some members. Then Eli mentions that, if you'd still like to apply, you should do so in the following day or two. However, Axyy received his promotion on the very same day as Eli's message..?
You didn't even give people the time to adapt to the changed dates and altered them out of nowhere, and you didn't give the community 2 more days like you promised.
This means that you had already done the interviews before the applications even closed, and didn't give the rest of the applicants that still wanted to apply a chance, as you'd already selected your winning candidate. It gives the image that you were waiting for him to apply and give him the interview+the role immediately, and then closed the applications. We aren't saying this is our final verdict and that this is 100% true. We're just saying that it really seems like this.
Lozora’s promotion to Recruitment Head
Let's move on to Lozora, since he has been assigned a higher position more often than once, 1 of which was quite recently. Axyy stopped being Recruitment Head and almost immediately Lozora was put forward again and stopped being Communication Head, to replace Axyy. How does this work? First of all, a large number of experienced Translators are denied the Communication role because an inexperienced person had to be hired so badly and now he is putting those duties aside and being helped to a new role? I don’t know whether this was his own decision, so I consider this to be decided by the entire Heads Team. And all this happened without applications, since the community here has also not been given a chance to get a spot on the Heads Team. This is another huge example of the unprecedented favoritism within the team. Don't you understand that it's incredibly discouraging if you, as a member of the team, would like to do more for the team, but the distribution of roles most of the time is in favor of acquaintances of the Heads? Probably this part will also be brushed off as a quick fix due to the lack of time, whilst in fact this is a mistake by the Heads team, which has resulted in disadvantaging the community as they have been denied yet another opportunity to hold a higher position within the team. You turn your own problem - apparently time is quite a thing for the Heads Team - into the community's problem, since they are not offered the same opportunities as acquaintances of the Heads Team.
Another example
Furthermore, this is certainly not the only case of Elena favouring people without experience. I can remember a case in the Events team where Bean (no offense, in the end you did well for the short time you led the Events team) was promoted to Events Head - with no experience whatsoever - while we as Events team had already decided it would be Riley. Absolutely no joke: Her primary main argument for this change was 'Simply because of her amazingness'. Ridiculous. Eventually, we got into a discussion with Elena after this, coming to the conclusion that we should just give her her time. Does that not sound familiar to you? In the cases of Lozora (and Axyy's promotion to Recruitment Head, different story around the time of Lozora's promotion) we also had to just give them their time to perform their functions. The example is a bit older, but is meant to show that this is not the first time that the Heads, including Elena with a large share, make these mistakes. That is the circle you then end up in, because acquaintances of hers without any credit whatsoever are given infinite credit by her, while others are given no opportunity at all.
EDIT
Another thing has recently come to our attention surrounding favoritism, namely that team heads and team leads now have the privilege to add anyone into the team as a (reports) translator. This is incredibly problematic and again- very frustrating to see because obviously anyone would want their friend to have a chance to join the team, and these hand picked people are now joining whilst others are denied the chance, without the use of any sort of application whatsoever.
At the moment, it is not about the quality of the translators, they have been tested and prepared for the work that they’ll need to be doing as a translator. What concerns us most is the way in which these translators are selected. Everyone would love to have a friend on the team but it doesn't work that way because everyone should have an equal chance. In this case, we do not know how good these people are or whether they would be better than others, but these 'others' did not even have a chance because no applications were used.
Let’s be realistic. These people were picked out to be on the team because these team leads and team heads knew them personally. Obviously they wouldn’t have gotten picked if nobody knew them, but the problem is more that others never even got the chance to apply. They’re picking these people over other people because they know them personally, this is the literal meaning of favoritism.
The team’s argument for this decision is because ‘we have big projects coming up and we could use more hands’. Again with the argument of ‘we’re incredibly busy and we don’t have enough time’. This argument is completely invalid in this case because the revamp has taken a year and there have been 2 different recruitment managers so far. Applications could have been open 8 months ago, but instead you decide to pick people out based on your own volition.
Revamp
The Revamp is one of those things where a lot has been promised by the Heads, but in the given time there are actually very few results. I will keep the beginning short; far too much time is spent on things that should not have taken so long at all.
Communication
I don't have a precise view behind the scenes, but I have enough people telling me things about what could be better in the team, and the revamp is a frequently mentioned topic among them. The reason for this is not necessarily that the revamp is a bad thing in itself; opinions are divided on the subject, so I won't dwell on it too much, except for one subject (which I think is quite important, since we're talking about a team). My main concern is the long time spent on this revamp, without any real verifiable progress (for a long time). There have been changes made around the team lately, but it's still not fully implemented. For example, the applications have not yet been opened, so the team has basically come to a standstill in terms of recreational communication. More on this in a moment, let's get to the main point first, before we move on to other points surrounding this revamp. The main points concerning the revamp are actually... a little unclear? A channel called #team-revamp was created in response to widespread criticism from team members and insistence, but it has already been removed while the revamp is still in progress. As a result, the community no longer gets a concrete picture of what the higher roles in the team are actually doing, because communication is stopped in this way. A new channel called #changelog has been created, so who knows, information about the revamp might still be shared there. But anyway, the point is that after certain agreements were made, these agreements are now actually being renegotiated...? The fact that you don't get a storm of criticism anymore doesn't mean that the sharing of information has to stop. It is certainly not the case that everything should be shared, but I do think that certain progress you have made should be shared. I think if you don't share anything with your community, you don't make enough relevant progress, right?
Revamp will probably outlast Queen Elizabeth
Now I can jump to the second topic of the revamp: the incredibly long wait. After much searching (we could not find the exact answer, probably the original channel was deleted or we overlooked the message), we came to the conclusion that the revamp was mentioned somewhere around March 2020. We even came across posts from February and before, but without sufficient context, we did not know if these were related to this revamp. Therefore, we are sticking with March 2020, but don't hesitate to correct me if this is incorrect - if the original date is before or maybe after that. Meanwhile, an entire year has gone by and the revamp is still not complete. Now it's very easy to use the arguments 'the Heads are people who make mistakes too' and 'the Heads deserve free time too', but it’s not that easy to get around. I would like to share that Elena gets paid to do her job, so the 'free time argument' applies here in a lesser form, since leading the team is her job. Anyway, first of all, Axyy's argument. Axyy, there has been quite a lot of criticism in this thread towards the decision to make you Proofreader, but I think you handled the following situation well. Something happened in your private life (we’re wishing you a lot of strength) and then you put aside your duties of being a Recruitment Head, because you felt the team deserved a Head who could give 100%. You deserve praise for that! I don't expect everyone on the Heads team to be able to give 100% for the team and I certainly don't expect the Heads team to spend all their free time on the team, but I do expect these people to be able to make themselves available to the extent that they can to really contribute. The Heads team itself will probably deny this, but this way it just looks like you are screwing around, doesn't it? Unbelievable, possibly more than a year spent on these changes. I remember a very long presentation by Elena around the summer, giving information about how the roles would be organised after the revamp. By then, the plans were already in place, so implementing them was a piece of cake, right? I remember that the original deadline was already before that presentation, but anyway. In the end, the deadline for the revamp came down to somewhere around the turn of the year and now we're still at it.
Of course, there are more changes involved than just the organisation of roles, such as the writing of guides (partly unnecessary in my opinion) and I am certainly not saying that it is all tremendously easy, but surely the desired changes should have been able to be implemented within.. let’s say a month or 2? After a lot of hard work and dedication, I believe this should have been possible. These are of course speculations and thoughts of a non-Head, but the point is clear; it has taken far too long. It is as if the way you defended yourself was all big talk, but the actual deeds took a long time to come.
Ruining your community
The long time that revamp has taken to be implemented (and still is taking) has had a negative effect on many things; that is a known fact. I think a very bad consequence of this situation is the death of the community. I mean it, it is dead. It has taken an incredibly long time until new Events Coordinators were hired (due to the Revamp) and in the meantime the community has been dying off in small steps at a time, while Jensieboy carried the Events Team on his back. No new people have entered the Translations Team, due to the closing of the applications, and therefore the community and the aforementioned recreational communication have come to a standstill. I don't think you realise what incredible opportunities you may have missed by closing the Translator applications for a year. Great, hard-working people have not been able to join the team because the Revamp is still going on. A real shame, as it was always great to see a mix of new, inexperienced Translators interacting with other experienced Translators who have been part of the community for some time. I understand that the applications had to be shut down for a while, but for so long? I don't think so.
Translator Rank
I (Remi) have written a thread about the Translator rank before, only part of the community disagreed with me. I think we still have a good point, maybe I could have phrased it better so we didn't end up in an endless discussion about the Designer rank. In order to avoid discussions about this rank, I would like to make it clear that I do not want to talk about this rank, because I do not have enough information to have a discussion or defend a position on this rank. I have never been a member of the Designer team, but I have seen (as Tex did) what the Translator rank has done to the team, so let's focus on that.
The big problem with the Translator rank is that it rewards quantity rather than quality, which is a problem in and of itself but this is besides the point. Because it only rewards quantity, a lot of members will try and claim as much work as possible for themselves whilst others are left with almost nothing to do, and this is a huge problem. We, as proofreaders, have had a lot of complaints about most members not getting any work at all and for this reason we, as the Dutch team, have had to split up the work evenly. This was a good fix. Everyone had something to do, but it soon raised another problem with the introduction of Translator rank, namely that none of the Dutch members have had the chance to truly show off their skills so there are NO Dutch translators or proofreaders that have the translator rank right now (that haven’t obtained it from being a manager/Head of team) even though the Dutch team is the biggest team.
Long story short, because Elena and none of the other managers/Team heads have any insight in any of the teams (because there’s such a big difference between a manager and a normal member) none of the Dutch team members have Translator. This is nothing except annoying and really backwards.
TL;DR/conclusion
Elena has a closed group of friends that run the Translation Team. In this article we take Lozora and Axyy as an example. They, amongst other people, got very major promotions out of nowhere, usually without applications for said positions ever being opened. This has led to much of the team being incredibly discouraged, jealous, and annoyed at the fact that Elena kind of just puts people in certain positions just because she knows them, it seems. Many people strive to one day become a PR or a Head of Team but Elena tends to just give promotions to her close friends within the translation team and it’s so blatant and heart wrenching to see how it’s virtually impossible for the normal member to get anywhere anymore with Elena being so incredibly closed up on who to even *give a chance*. For us, and many others, the team is kind of ruined. We still love the community and the translating work but it’d be nice if everyone got an equal chance at getting somewhere higher, and it’d be nice as well if Elena’s buddies were in the same boat as all of us.
Unkept promises. They are pretty common nowadays in the translation team. The revamp, for example, was promised to us to be “soon” multiple times. The first time they said the revamp would be out “soon” was about 5 months ago. We still don’t have any updates regarding the revamp at all. The team is still slowly dying because there haven’t been any new people joining in almost a year. It has descended to a few people still talking in there daily, but an active conversation in the team is very rare nowadays. Compare this to a year ago, when I, Tex, was accepted into the team as a trainee, and later became a translator. The team was so lively and fun to be in. Almost everyone talked in there, relationships were built, events were had, I remember talking in the off topic channel for hours on end just talking about stuff that didn’t matter to anyone, but I had the time of my life. It seems everyone just went their separate ways.
All in all we just want change. We want the old team back. We don’t want some people like Axyy and Lozora to have a much higher chance at stepping into a high position than the normal Translation Team member. We want the applications to be opened so more people can join and the older, inactive translators to be replaced with new faces. We want to do all the fun stuff like proofreading tests and translating whole excel sheets again, but nothing we do seems to reach the managers of the team, so that’s why we have made this thread. We hope to have been able to influence your views on the team slightly and we’ll have to keep hoping for change.
Credits
Thanks to @Texbirds for helping me write, think and a lot of other stuff
Thanks to @AlperenSV for helping me with ideas and evidence
And some others whose names I won't mention due to their role on the team!
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