As if my experience with games that clearly throw the game’s text into google translate wasn’t bad enough. Really not a huge fan of this update and the fact some devs will pick this over actual genuine translators just saddens me, going to probably switch my language back to english if i start noticing problems with this new “feature”.
EDIT: Well who could have guessed, had to switch back to english since roblox has forced this update that clearly doesn’t work onto me without any way to opt out other than changing my language, we should be given an option to opt out of something that’s clearly not refined enough, forcing it onto a whole language is just not the way to go.
This sounds great, making Roblox games accessible to much more languages will gain a lot of extra players for Roblox. Keep it up
Also, I kinda think this is making AI take over even more, what will happen to @Translators after this change? This just seems like it’s killing more jobs, they’ve ruined Clothing Designers and they tried to destroy SFX Designers with the Tommy Tallorico advert in Announcements and now it feels like their next aim is Translators. Roblox should be trying to keep as much human jobs on the platform as possible.
Yes!!! Finally, this is out for everyone!
And for anyone asking:
You can set the AutoLocalize property to false on instances you don’t want to be automatically translated (such as bubble chats).
And strings like “You earned 50 coins” turn into something like “You earned {{number1}} coins” on the translator portal so the number is preserved.
Today is a bad day.
Automatic translations are really inaccurate, they will never really replace human translations. Things such as context matters a lot, there are many words in english that do not have a literal translation to portuguese, I’m sure many other languages will suffer with that same thing.
I’m pretty sure the only happy people with this update are either small developers with no viable way of hiring translators or average players who do not know automatic translations suck.
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 ‘.’
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.
AI cannot detect context at all, most strings will be confusing to read and totally not readable or understood.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
