Computers are good at dealing with things which are well defined. Languages are not well defined, translation even less so. There are many examples of badly translated books that were done by human professional translators so if even they don’t have a good way of ensure they are translating well computers have no chance.
It comes down to the fact that language is hard. You can change one word in a sentence and have it mean something completely different. Or you can have two sentences that have almost no common words but mean the same thing. The same word can have many meanings depending on context both within the sentence and within the wider context of the text. Phrases can mean different things based on arbitrary things like historic and social context.
A language is always linked to its culture, so no matter how perfect a translation is, if the cultural elements of the language aren’t taken into account, the translated text will fail to communicate to the readers in the same manner as the writer intended.
I will show a few screenshots of the difficulties/problems a German & Dutch translator has with Automatic Translations:
The inability of Automatic Translations to understand the sentence and translate it correctly
Translation and incorrect translation of the string that should not actually be translated
Major difficulties with translators trying to correct all of them due to incorrectly translated strings. This is really hard, he needs to check them all out and not miss any strings. Manually translated strings were automatically retranslated.
Thus, we have seen once again that Machine Translations do not provide accurate translations and that no matter how much improvement is tried, it will most likely fail.
Although a useful feature for developers who cannot afford translators, it may not be very useful for those developers.
Automatic translations that do not translate languages accurately can cause major problems for players around the world.
As a result of the incorrect translation of languages, players around the world will not be able to understand even the sentences in their own/native language, and even prefer ENGLISH to their own/native language.
If you are a developer who can afford to hire a Translator, I would definitely recommend hiring a human translator.(of course real human translators )
And if you are a developer who cannot hire translators, you should consider this again when using automatic translations. Instead of attracting players, you could lose players from around the world.
It seems like it was enabled today. A lot of games I work on has doubled or even tripled in string count and causing general chaos among my co-workers. As well as one of the games I dev has added translations that we weren’t planning on. It would have been nice if we got a heads-up that this was happening. I’m really tired of the terrible communication between us and the staff.
I am absolutely very mad at this update. I have to unenable dozens of my games that are active and use labels, IN STUDIO! It is extremely tedious to go through studio and unenable the translations. Considering it takes 1-2 minutes per game, it’d mean I could take well over 30 mintues to an hour to do it! This waste peoples’ time for those who don’t want it, just another factor which leads to people not wanting to be on this platform. Roblox keeps pushing out updates which are time consuming to fix, like new properties for objects, removal of certain things, etc. Is it a good path? Maybe for some people it helps, but for the majority not wanting to overhaul all their work just to make it playable, is not the right way for Roblox to handle our works in the first place.
I don’t mind the machine translations but would have appreciated it if Automatic Text Capture wasn’t suddenly enabled. Obby Creator’s string count has increased by almost 50% with random strings that I didn’t add manually. Will need to remove them all now which is a bit annoying, to be honest!
I really don’t appreciate the fact that I wasn’t warned about the fact that automatic translation and automatic text capture were going to be enabled by default. I prefer paying for manual translations instead of having machine translations for my games, so this automatic change was unexpected and not very welcome.
If the release of automatic translation support is something that you would like to disable for your game, you can do so by going into your game’s Configure Localization page, navigating to the Settings tab, disable the Automatic Text Capture setting and flush the table. Flushing of the table will remove any automatically scraped text that has an automatic translation or no translation. This will NOT impact any scraped entry with a manual translation or any manually added entries.
We want to acknowledge a point that many of you have brought up in this thread regarding contextual translations. We understand that Roblox is a unique domain and translating content within our games is often difficult without the proper contextualization. Our team is working on further optimizations to automatically derive context to make our translation quality better. We also want to reiterate that we have done extremely rigorous testing and analysis prior to moving forward with this launch and have seen a positive impact directly on all players, especially new ones.
We appreciate your patience and support as we continue to push forward here on our vision on connecting audiences around the world on Roblox!
Why not make the setting manual, not forced? No one will see your reply, out of 37 developers I’ve worked with, 5 people at max saw this topic, not talking about your reply alone. Now machine translations got mixed up with manual ones, and we can’t do anything about it. I also would like to mention that it is not my job to properly inform my clients about localization breaking updates.
Just to clarify a few things, I hold no grudge against machine translations. People who pay for localization are aware of how terrible the feature in question is, which is why it does not affect my client-flow. But I do hate the fact that it is interfering with the job I’m doing, and developers are not liking it.
The only thing that is currently being positively received by players is the ONLY release of this feature. Because they don’t know the system generated strings and translations, they can’t form a conversation about these.
We have presented here with a lot of evidence that automatic translation creates and translates strings with Incorrectly and NSFW contents.
If you want to make sure of the correctness of these generated and translated strings, you can find this out by creating a survey.
An issue that has been affecting translators recently:
Really great update! This would really help my game expand to a much ranger audience! My only concern is that trusting AI with all of my game is bound to have a couple of errors in the process.
Is this whole automatic translation thing providing real-time translations to my game? I was confused because “in-game strings” can pretty much mean anything, it’s incredibly broad. Chat messages are strings too so I wanted to know if it would apply to the Roblox chat or a custom chat. I don’t have plans on getting access to an API like Google Translate because of how incredibly expensive it is.
I really like the idea of automatic translations, but it would be nice for our translators if we could get some sort of blue dot as an indicator that a game string is auto translated instead of just making it a green dot like the manual translations. Sometimes the automatic translations don’t quite get it right and a manual translator is required, but without highlighting which translations are automatic, the translator would have to go through the other translators manual strings unnecessarily, making work less productive.
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