As a Roblox developer, it is currently too hard to display furigana to players, and as a result, it’s difficult to show natural Japanese translations while keeping our game accessible to younger audiences.
Furigana is a way of showing the phonetic pronunciation of Japanese, common in media targeted towards kids.
Japanese has three writing scripts:
- Hiragana, a phonetic script that’s a lot like the English alphabet. This is often the first script learned by both children and foreign speakers.
- Katakana, another phonetic script with nearly one-to-one match of hiragana. This is often learned second, and is used in specific cases, such as foreign loan words.
- Kanji, a script where each symbol roughly matches up to one word. The baseline literacy expected after compulsory education is over 2,000 symbols.
Furigana is meant to aid in the comprehension of kanji by displaying phonetic hiragana above.
Without furigana, for our Japanese translations we have to choose between…
- being extremely long, showing kanji plus hiragana on the same line in parentheses
- being too long and unnatural, using hiragana for everything
- being short, showing no phonetic pronunciation, but inaccessible to the target audience of our game
Implementing furigana ourselves is strictly possible, but has significant difficulties:
- we can’t tie into Roblox’s text layouting engine ourself, so we’d have to make our own text components with specialized spacing and specialized markup. In other words, we’d be unable to use Roblox’s built-in TextLabel objects directly, instead having to pass all text through an abstraction layer that does special layouting for all languages for the sole purpose of adding furigana in one language.
- we would have to go back and retrofit the custom text system into every ui in our game
This is not a feasible amount of work for us to do.
Roblox has a few options to implement this for the benefit of all games on the Roblox platform:
- Roblox can add a Rich Text tag for displaying furigana. There is already a standard set of tags for this called ruby markup.
- Roblox can add some other sort of generally-supported sequence and/or property to add furigana/ruby characters to text.
- Roblox can do something else if they find an even better way. The point of a feature request is to show Roblox a problem we’re facing, not to provide solutions! The experts at Roblox may know a better solution than we do!
Small note: sorry if I got anything wrong here. I’m not a native Japanese speaker and I’m pretty rusty on the Japanese I learned in high school. Even if I got some terms or definitions wrong here, the overall point of this feature request is still clear!
If Roblox is able to address this issue, it would improve our development experience because we’d be able to properly support our target audience in Japan in a significantly easier manner. This would likely allow us to bring our game to thousands of new players!