I don’t think so. As said thousands of times before, automatic translation will never replace human translation, the reason is simple: context.
Context matters mores than anything else and English being a tricky language, the same word can be 3 verbs and 5 nouns.
One of the most common examples is the verb play. While in English, you can play an instrument or play a game. In Portuguese, you can only tocar an instrument and jogar a game.
It’s in the human nature, though. As long as it is free, you’re gonna pick the free option.
Sure. It’s a great thing for small developers who can’t afford translators and want their games localized. But for people with enough resources, it’s totally advised to have translators.
You know, a bad translation can be worse than no translation.
This won’t be a good thing for smaller developers. With inaccurate translations developers of all kinds will inevitably be providing a HORRIBLE UX.
Yes, true. I don’t think it’s great, but they think so (That’s what I was trying to say). However, I see the point of small developers being happy with this update even though it’s quite problematic.
Here are the pros to this update:
1, For small devs you get a basically free but not good translator
Here are the cons to this update:
1, Automatic translators are just garbage since of how bad translating it is. Could lead to swear words and other offensive words. (Go for Human Translators)
2, Some people are prob gonna shortcut and instead of hiring a translator, they just get the automatic translator. This would make it harder for translators to get hired.
This update really only helps small developers who can’t afford to hire a translator
Why are people complaining about this rollout? There are literally only benefits to this situation - small developers (which there are a lot of) who cannot afford translation but still want to somewhat support other languages can now do so. Obviously, it’s not good, but if they can’t afford any better alternatives then this is better than nothing. Especially with this full-platform roll-out, I believe the automatic translator will improve itself through the various large amounts of data being collected, thus allowing it to better translate content.
If you don’t like it, just disable the feature and hire translators. No one is preventing you from doing so!
Disagree, nobody knows what the machines will output their translations, could it be profanity, could it be bad grammar, or could it possibly be a pejorative, who knows?
Okay, then just disable it fully in that case. What is the issue?
And as stated, with such a large data set that people are providing with their games to the translator, it will become reliable (in terms of cuss-words) very quickly.
What if it was disabled by default and could be enabled at any time. Instead of forcing it to everyone without their consent.
Why do you think they’re announcing this beforehand?
Most of the platform users don’t even know of the existance of the DevForum.
And what prevents them from doing a quick google search? I’m sure every major game developer is a DevForum member, or has at least heard of it. Implying people don’t know how to search for how to disable automatic translation is equivalent to saying they are unable to perform a simple google search.
Thing is most people won’t notice their game has been translated unless a player tells them.
No it won’t, google is able to get hundreds of times more data than roblox will ever be able to get in days.
And still google fails to translate correctly most of the time.
Because google supports nearly every language on earth. Also, Google does not benefit off of it’s translator, whilst a translator is one of the most crucial aspects for Roblox.
Alright, what do you think old backs auto translation from being efficient?
If your response is not text context, human writing behaviour and complexity, then you are wrong.
Languages are complicated, more complicated that what they seems, you cannot just translate one item from a language to another literally, you need context, and some times that context is not in the string of the item, but instead its inside the visual content that the user is able to see. A translation will never be right because of this.
Profanity’s are even worst, translators can fail and can put profanity’s where there’s none, which can lead to well, some questionable moments.
I also did some testing, and with only 5 strings text they all where in a way wrong, 2 where completely wrong, 2 others contained useless pronouns, and one was just literally translated, which meant it was correct but not good enough and the user would have probably been lost.
While automatic translation is a great tool, it should be turned off by default, and let developers turn it on by themselves.
And so we go back a full circle. Just turn it off, it is that simple.
Nope. Bad idea. I’m not even a translator and I think this is a huge mistake.
AI is imperfect and automatically translating things is a terrible idea. A lot of people that are for this idea think that it will be helpful for small developers (such as myself), but, in the end, it will only worsen things. We can’t become reliant on this faulty technology.
Context is critical to speaking a language well. Google Translate has a lot of funding and research put into it, but it doesn’t matter. The translations are still imperfect and I can’t imagine the disaster that this new feature would cause.
Let’s be honest, nobody asked for this. Roblox should be doing more effective things in their time, not making some fun auto-translate stuff.
I will be using human translators and not some computer garbage.