I think you’ve touched exactly on why translating is as much an art as it is a science. The translator imparts their own interpretation/mood/language preferences to the material in the translation, and different people’s translations have a different flavors. It can be really cool, lining them all up and comparing them!
As long as you’re consistent within a work, or as long as a group of people choose a consistent heuristic, it should be fine.
Further evidence that German is awesome.
Well, two things:
@ManOfRet You will learn to speak proper German… it’s not more difficult than any other language (that one you are learning is always the most difficult one 
).
The good thing about this community-translation is, that we might end up with not only one translation into a language. E.g. I could imagine that someone likes to have a more medieval translation, using old English or old German (or any other language). Someone else might like to have everythingi translated and again another player will prefer to use the real names. For sure it makes sense to create ONE base translation as a joint effort… but why not fork it at the end and change e.g. the names, formal language, etc.?
What, so:
German (Exact Translation)
German (Medieval German)
German (understandable? I can’t think of a good phrase to sum up normal names but German text)
That sounds quite cool, if you had the people and effort levels to do it 
Let’s not forget about ancient Anglo-Saxon (which I would gladly not help in translating )
I think the most effort is to have one base translation… and that’s where I would love to see a joint effort comming from the community. Once this is in place, I think playing around with the language and creating a fork of the translation could be a nice idea. Maybe someone wants to include it even in his mod… like using different names, accents and so on, to support the mod.
Ahhh yes, I get you. I keep forgetting about the collaboration that is half of the point of this thread. It’s probably because I’m not involved. However, since there is a fair mass of non-English people here, I would like to offer my services. It’s not exactly much, but any mods you’re planning on writing and putting in English, I’m happy to just run through and make sure you’re English is perfect a bit pathetic I know, but I only speak some Spanish so what can I do?
It could be like Civ, only not!
Well, i end my translation about Doom & Destiny (english > spanish).
I still thinking about help with my “translation group” ^^.
Ich glaube, ich habe einen guten Wortschatz, aber er ist kleiner als Voxel_Pirates.
I think I did that right…
@Geoffers747 You’re example makes perfect sense 
And yes geographicall names are in my “translate list”
But take Mer Burlyhands, I’m so not gooing to translate that into… Mer Potigehanden = .= IMO it sounds stupid 
@PownToK I agree and those places (“death valley”, “cave of horribleness” and “don’t come here or you’ll die”) would be a priority in getting translated, but I also think places like your example “Sunrise Mountain” would be nice to get translated, although the name could be changed to keep it’s feel… “Montagne du Lever du Soleil” doesn’t sound as good as “Montagne du Soleil Levant” ( “Mountain of the rising sun” ).
I think the feel can be as important as the literal translations.
P.S. Pas de problème, ça serait bien de pratiquer mon écriture française! 
@Cookie Bienvenue abord. It was just an example. Translate a text or a simple isolated word is a subjective thing and it need to be discuss between each team to improve and provide the best translation which can be made.
I am completely with @Geoffers747 there… I was with WoW from open Beta and for some following years and I remember the time when they began to translate each and every thing. For new players this is not recognizable but for those who were playing WoW and more importantly the Strategic titles Warcraft I to III had to take quite a blow. In the offline titles, places were named “Stormwind” and “Ironforge”… Individual names… Iconic names. But then, they began to rename even those locations and the names of individuals. Yes, they catched the meaning of them quite well and exact, but they are not the same. “Sturmwind” is kinda close, due to Storm and Wind translating to words so well with exchanging just 1 single character/letter. “Eisenschmelze” or “Eisenschmiede” is far less well translated in sound and look but technically well done and the meaning is preserved.
What I want to say is… they had build up recognizable value with those names and took them away. If we now take poor Burlyhands… we know him… we love him… and the German backers who not helped in the translation will wonder “Where is our Burlyhands? We miss him!” while he is just in front of them as for example “Strammhände” or “Starkhände” 
That said, if I get something to translate, I will leave out things I know are names, even as they might be problematic in some cases… I would not like to have my name translated into German as well if it comes up in a text. “Christian” is my name… it reads well, as long as you not translate it and thus reveal it’s meaning when using English (even more as I am not following a religion) 
You know, there is a reason why I often consult Leo.org for this or that translation if I have the feeling that I not get a good translation for a word. Usually then 5 or more possible translations pop up in either direction, you then have to look for the correct context and not just pick the first one. That is, if you want to have it as perfect as possible for you. To save you some worries… German is considered quite a hard to learn language.
You did that one perfect
to me, the person’s name is irrelevant (from a gaming perspective), it’s their function in the game, that matters to me as the player… so, making an accurate translation of “burly hands” into German (i would think) is far less important than translating the fact that he is a “stone mason”, etc.
On the subject of translating proper names - my last name is German and has no apparent English meaning besides being hard to pronounce. I researched it back in high school, apparently it actually means something like “worthless bum.” That’s actually true. The family still has a good laugh over it.
Sometimes names are best left as the original name IMO. I think it is cool to have the modder leave their touch on the game with whatever proper names they chose.
Reading the different arguments swayed my opinion towards the no translation faction.
As I see it Stonehearth is a heavily moddable game, so names should be left to the discretion of the mod creators, meaning that the vanilla Stonehearth as mod of its own (the mother of all mods if you will) should be completely left to Team Radiant in regards to lore and associated names.
If players want a 100% with names translated game, then they could probably apply that as mod of its own.
This way names are also a good way for mods to distinct themselves, for example the chronicle mod could have a Jovoxel Gutenhearth as inventor of the book press or such.
At least there should be a configuration option for modders to set translation up, so names are excluded or included from the translation files.
I posted this in the alternate name generation thread, but I think it might be better off here…
With keeping original names (specifically of People), I believe it would be good to look at this on a case-by-case basis. Germans may very well understand who “Burlyhands” is, and why he’s so goddamn good with his hands, as the English may recognise that “StrammHande” or “StarkHande” sounds strong and to do with hands,…but what about our poor Italian buddy? Stramm, Stark or Burly are very far away from the Italian equivalents.
@PDanford I think the exclusion/inclusion list is a really good idea, so that names that are supposed to stay the same could stay the same. This leads me to ask the maybe already answered question…
Are we translating from Localization files? And are we translating only the original game, or will that also include popular mods and such?