Hi everyone!
Throughout the past few months, we have continued rolling out automatic translation throughout the platform so that all players, regardless of the language they speak, can enjoy Roblox. We at the Translation team are happy to announce a few recent updates as well as an upcoming release!
As a reminder:
-
Over 50% of Roblox users speak languages other than English.
- Translation can increase your engagement and retention, especially for new players! This means that with translation, players will play your experience for longer periods of time and are also more likely to return.
- Even though automatic translation accuracy is currently lower than manual translation, we have seen the same increases in engagement and retention! This means that the player experience is better with automatic translation vs no translation.
- Translation coverage is important: experiences that have over 80% of their strings translated will see the most impact.
For more context on the benefits of translation and some past releases, please read the past announcement.
Now, onto the updates!
Auto Translation is Open to All Experiences
In our past releases, we were only able to release auto translation to top experiences. However, we want everyone to have access to the tools and services we built. As of earlier this month, we have opened up auto translation for all devs â now, any dev can go into their localization settings and enable auto translation for their experience!
To turn on auto translation for your experience:
Navigate to the Localization tab for your experience on the Creator Dashboard. Add an auto translation-supported language by clicking Add Language.
Click the more options icon next to the language youâd like to enable auto translation for, and select Turn on auto translation for either Experience Strings & Products or Experience Information.
In just a couple of minutes, translations for that language should appear in your localization table! If youâre not seeing translations, please comment below and let us know. Note: at this point, we only support auto translation if your experienceâs source/original language is English. We are looking to support non-English source languages in the future.
Vietnamese & Polish Support for Automatic Translation
Next, we would like to share that Roblox Translate now supports Vietnamese and Polish, in addition to the thirteen languages we currently support (Chinese - simplified, Chinese - traditional, French, German, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Thai, and Turkish).
For experiences that have not opted out of Automatic Translation, you do not need to do anything â Vietnamese and Polish will be automatically enabled for your experience in the next few days!
For experiences that have opted out of Automatic Translation but would like to opt back in for Vietnamese or Polish, please follow the instructions on how to enable automatic translation in the previous section.
And for experiences that would like to opt out, you can always turn off Automatic Translation in your Localization settings on the website as well (see screenshot above). We do strongly recommend keeping Automatic Translation on, as the higher translation coverage you have, the better playtime and retention metrics you will see for your experience.
As always, we welcome Vietnamese and Polish translators to share any mistranslations or feedback with us in the comments below so we can improve our translation support.
Official Roblox Translator Community
In the last update we posted, we shared some plans to start an official Roblox Translator Community, and many of you were interested. As of this week, we have soft-launched the community as a private category on the Devforum.
Why should I join?
So you can meet other Roblox translators, participate in translator surveys (from the Translation team at Roblox), share feedback on Automatic Translation, and engage in the future of Translation products at Roblox!
Who can join?
Currently, this is an invite-only private community. As we are ironing out the kinks and getting this community set up, we are looking for translators who have worked on a couple of projects already. We are looking for folks who can help us set up the structure â for example, what are the resources for first time translators, what are the best practices for translation, and how to give feedback on Roblox Translate, our in-house machine translation solution.
Once we have established the community a little more, we would like to open the community up to newer translators who are looking to learn how to be a Roblox translator.
How can I join?
If interested please DM @hydr0h0mie via the DevForum with your Talent Hub creator page (that lists your translation experience). We are planning to add members in batches, and may take a few weeks in between batches. We will be taking applications for the foreseeable future and will update this post if they become closed. We are looking for the following criteria:
Required:
- Fluent in at least one non-English language
- Experience translating for at least one known experience
Preferred:
- Experience working with teams of translators (on Roblox)
- Strong written communicator or has experience writing guides
Not sure how to set up your Talent Hub portfolio? Just navigate to the Talent Hub, click your avatar/username, and click âEdit Creator Pageâ.
Any Feedback?
Once again, thank you so much for your support as we continue to improve our translation offerings! If you have any questions, feedback, or concerns, please feel free to comment below!
Best,
@Caelestene and the Translation team
Looking forward to improve the roblox localization.