That’s basically correct. The sentence will be translated and the number will remain the same. Numbers will also localize to the correct format for separators like ‘,’ and ‘.’
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Is there a choice to only translate certain strings?
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Only if you set up the UI in-game to not translate.
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What I’m worried about is how well accurate is the Automatic Translation is, personally I would still just hire a normal translator
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This may be a decent update for people who would love to have localization implemented in their game but cannot afford hiring others.
However, it’s advised to let people know about their multiple and fatal disadvantages.
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AI cannot detect context at all, most strings will be confusing to read and totally not readable or understood.
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Some translators (me included) have found out that some common words in certain languages are so poorly translated that they translate to swear words or other inappropriate contexts. Keep in mind these strings dont get censured or anything, as they pass moderation automatically.
[https://twitter.com/dronetto_/status/1336108499651137536?s=21](check this tweet out) -
If you think hiring professional translators is a worthless investment, rethink your options. You may spend a lot on every single one of us; however with good and accurate localization you’ll attract a more wide audience into your game and obtain more profits.
If you get poor localization, players won’t feel pleased to play the game, and would either stop playing the game or swap languages to English (which would make localization useless.)
Please i beg everyone to know that Automatic Translations are not effective, and not only your game gets affected, but the actual freelancers on the platform whose job is to translate games.
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Although I do think this “helps” many developers quickly port their games to other languages (in an effortless way which I wouldn’t recommend if they are looking for a quality end product), I believe that the way Roblox marketed this feature as “near to natural language” was inappropriate and should instead have been marketed as a temporary solution for quick language support.
David Baszucki told us during Virtual RDC 2020 that it would be a completely accurate feature after the developer community had expressed concern about the potential downsides.
Nothing will replace human translation, and this will be reflected in most games where Roblox translators have been working for years and the creators see value in international user retention.
Real retention, not first session duration or even 1-week return, which I assume is the “newer user retention” metric you guys have measured:
As a final comment, this very issue (bad automatic translation) is where human, community-sourced efforts came into place, since many—even Roblox—had expressed that having a few translators may be too little for the number of content updates of some games, and it seems this automatic translation feature has just started to show the flaws that many of us feared but knew it would have.
Just one reference for flaws: Machine translations for certain languages are incorrect for the most part - Bug Reports / Engine Bugs - DevForum | Roblox
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They said it in the post. As you can see from the quote.
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Feedback
Personally I think this will have a good outcome (being optimistic). If this isn’t automatic translation that is extremely inaccurate like many other translating machines, then this will open up to other users.
As long as it doesn’t get in my way as a primary English speaker, and isn’t inaccurate, then I don’t see issues.
Feedback and Answers to Replies
Assuming that they use real data, it will likely be preserved or said in word form in the langauge.
This was discussed in the post. They said “Spanish, Portuguese, French, German, Japanese, Korean, Italian and Russian.”
This is a great point, as many other translations are using automated, and are very inaccurate and inappropriate. If you ever tested Google Translate, make a paragraph in English (or your primary language), run that through multiple languages in random orders, and convert it back to English. It will likely NOT match up.
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I asked what languages are planned for the future, not the ones being enabled now.
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What does Roblox use to translate content? I personally haven’t run into inappropriate translations frequently I don’t believe, the biggest problem I have with machine translation is it not interpreting informalities properly. (especially Spanish ones, but I speak it natively anyway so doesn’t matter for me when translating) That is why I have the main website set to English because of the poor automatic translations of games. I don’t know if I can trust machine translations with other languages I do not have enough experience in to confidently self-translate.
While I don’t specialize in translation across the platform I can see it as a little disrespectful to the people that actually make a tangible benefit from this, as there is obviously so much value in having a human do it for you, since they probably speak it natively to have the confidence anyway.
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This basically means that they would add these languges next after they are ready.
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I feel like the idea behind this was good but, the actual thought process behind this was ok. Automatic translations will never supersede manual translations and while having that option may seem like a benefit… from a foreign speaker seeing the wrong grammar, wrong diction, etc on a platform will definitely steer a lot of people away. If the translations are accurate, this is a power move. If not, this will be risky to implement from a developer’s perspective.
Still though, translators are slowly being phased out for automatic solutions. Which is a bit surprising given that most people won’t match a price now that it’s largely free.
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What about games using a typewriter effect? Games with a lot of scripted strings? In the past, automatic text capture took EVERY string and our table was flooded with spam. We don’t want automatic text capture turned on, we input our strings manually! Do not force this on us!
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That’s exactly what’s going to happen. Roblox’s text scrapping technology unfortunately doesn’t recognize those effects and just spam everything. Some games resort to just translating them, others just translate the finished text.
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We have scripts in place to handle translating typewriter effects, it involves fetching the translated string before applying the effect. But I don’t want to have my tables spammed because it will be much harder to go in and properly translate the correct string when I have to sort through spam.
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And will the automatic translation also account for numbering systems, RBNF (for anyone not familiar with ICU, rule based number formatting so for examples one (English) to uno (Spanish)) and differences for Infinity and NaN (zh-Hant and ar are ones that comes to my mind) localisation?
I don’t think this will work out; I don’t know why Roblox seems to encourage this experiment but most seems to be against this.
Automatic translations at this stage cannot differentiate context. In Japanese, there are many ways to say I which cannot be determined by the English text alone. I could mean: 私, 我, 俺, etc. This right now, again can only be correctly done manually. automatic translation will actually do more harm than good if you use context-sensitive in your strings a lot.
1000 and 10,000 is translated in Spanish in four different ways:
- 1000 10 000 (RAE) - I almost always use this but the other options is more common
- 1000 10.000 (CLDR/ICU)
- 1.000 10.000
- 1,000 10,000 (Mexico and probably many central American country)
I’d like to know how would automatic translations like this account for things like this if even possible and how this number formatting system works for automatic translation.
It wasn’t explicitly specified what region/script/variants part of the language this experiment translates to, the language string that are supposed to be interpreted is could well not be American English, but British English or even (to be a bit esoteric) the POSIX compliant American English locale (en-US-u-va-posix) or English with Oxford Spelling. This can cause ambiguities as words like pants have different meaning. Good luck finding that out (esp. when the other part of the string have little difference in both English variants) 
I’m pessimistic about the direction Roblox has going about automatic translation and internationalisation in general. It’s been evident that Roblox undervalues manual translation and seems to embrace this controversial approach. I might as well not even bother to translate using Roblox’s localisation suite if this continues and shoved down upon us.
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Does this pretty much remove the role of a translator then? I know many of our users do that and it might make them sad. I know many good translators. I would be sad to see them replaced by this.
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No. This is clearly addressed in the original post. The AI is far from perfect and is not a full job so translators will be needed in the future to at least check over the work and provide translations for those who can afford it and need more specialised solutions (e.g. for the typewriter effect). Studios who want a good brand image will still use human translators completely over an algorithm anyway. I doubt it will affect translators much in the short-term, but it is definitely not a stable job for the future regardless.
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There are no other disclaimers outside of machine translation related topics, it’s safe to assume that 95% of people who will have this feature automatically enabled will never know.
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This is great to hear, just hoping that the translations are not poor. Will these translations help adapt with any slang terms? I’m assuming not. Since languages are always changing and adapting, I’m really curious to see how accurate these will be and if it will save me the hassle of finding a translator for my games.
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