Hello guys, Silviu1993 here. Today it's been a week since I joined Scorum, so I decided to make a post about me, but also about the platform and to share some tips with new users.
I'm more a translator than a blogger, so I didn't write many posts by myself but I only shared my opinion on the subject.
I've been born in Romania and at the age of 10, I came to Rome, where I actually live. At first, it wasn't easy to learn Italian but I had no choice and in 1 year I was already pretty good at it. Now I can say that I'm native Italian speaker and also a native Romanian speaker. Another language that I was interested in was English, and I trained myself on my own, by reading books, watching movies, listening to music, only in English so I could learn it better, and I have to say it worked, now that I also talk in English to people I'm learning more and more every day. I know it's still a long way till I'll become a master of English, but I have time. The next language that I want to train is Spanish or Russian, but I think I'll start it in 1 or 2 years because for now, I need to master my English level.
I'm an Italian and Romanian translator( I gave myself this title), I've been doing translations for many open source projects on Crowdin and I've been also a proofreader for some projects.
On Crowdin I mostly translated from English to Italian or from English to Romanian so I was not really used to translate from Italian to English.
For now, on Scorum, I'm translating sports articles from Italian to English and at first, I had some minor difficulties on translating to English cause I'm not native English and I had some difficulties with some sentences.
How to be a good translator?
In order to become a good translator, first of all, you need to know the 2 languages you are translating and be a native of one of them.
Even if you think you know one language well enough, when you'll start translating you will notice that, in fact, you know almost nothing about that language and either your translations will be bad, or it will take you a lot of time to search for all the sentences of which you are not sure. But do not stop, keep exercising and look for every word of which you are not sure and you will notice that your translations will get better and better every day and it will take you less and less time to make a good translation.
Also when you are translating something, don't just do it for the rewards, but do it to improve yourself, and your knowledge about that language, because, if you only do it for the rewards it will be much harder to do a good work. Instead, when you do something to improve yourself, you are a lot more motivated and you will do a better job, and automatically your rewards will also grow.
Do not plagiarize!
At first, I was not really aware that translating an article without being authorized by the author could be considered plagiarized. But after talking to some Scorum writers, they made me change my mind and I've learned that is ok to translate somebody's post if you clearly say that the post is a translation and you put the link to the source of the article on your post. You should also share your own thoughts and ideas on that subject.
If you can, try to talk to the owner of the article you want to translate and see if they agree to that. I tried that and one of three owners have accepted! Actually, my last translation post, not only was authorized by the website owner but he also asked me to share my translation on their website, giving me credits for it and sharing a link to my Scorum post. So maybe this link that they will share on their website will bring more people to Scorum, and will also bring more followers and fame to me (or maybe not) :D. Actually, most of those who didn't accept were some of the most famous newspapers in Italy and they didn't accept because of copyright issues.
The Double-Edged Sword
I joined Scorum just a week ago, and even if I don't know everything about it yet, I have already seen that it is growing pretty fast, every day I can see new guys sharing their post on the platform, but the fact that one actually get's paid to post is a double-edged sword, because every time that there are money involved people will become selfish and try to actually rape the reward pool in order to get more and more money for themselves, by creating multiple accounts, by just copy-paste articles from the web and saying those are written by them, by investing in Scorum just so they could upvote their own post and make more money out of it. But all of those things I think can be stopped, and the fact that this website will be mostly sports related means, that more people will actually read a post before upvoting it.
If we want to improve Scorum, we are the ones that have to decide what get's promoted and what doesn't and we also have to suggest new features and new ways of fighting abuse, before it becomes like other social media like Scorum.
We have to create more communities and to interact more with each other, we need no automatic votes, but we should only vote for one thing if we like it and if we think it deserves our vote, I also suggest that when you see a plagiarized article you try to talk to the guy that shared it and try to make him understand that this is no good behavior and he should try to write his own things. Most of the people that plagiarize, do that because they think that this is the easy way to make money and they don't understand that this is something wrong and something that they should not do.
Scorum is still in his early days, so I say let's educate people. We don't need to punish them, we need to make them understand why what they are doing is wrong. Let's make this website great as it deserves to be.
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