As a Roblox developer, it’s not currently possible to translate arbitrary text from users without paying for an external translation service (such as Google Translate). This is a problem in our experience, Clip It, because everything in our game is user-generated and largely inaccessible to the global Roblox audience. Twenty percent of our users don’t speak English as a first language, which massively limits their engagement with the content in our app.
Clip It is a social media and video creation app with a global ‘For You’ feed, similar to TikTok and Reels. Below are examples of content in our app that aren’t currently translated:
- The caption under videos
- Comments on a video
- Bios on a user profile
There are other cases of user-generated text that would ideally be translated, but those three are the most important for our use case. Without real-time in-place text translation, a huge portion of UGC content in our experience is inaccessible to the global audience.
Our proposed solution is to expose Roblox’s new real-time text chat translation feature to developers through a new Lua API. Translating text should be just as easy as filtering text.