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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Prepare to see many “back” (as in going back) translations in GUIs in Spanish translating to “espalda” (as in your body back) instead of “atrás” (as in going back).
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Big numbers in leaderboards are already localized in Spanish to 10,000
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As happy as I am about this, this might hurt translators within the community that offer their services.
I don’t expect this rollout to be top-notch quality since many platforms can get languages wrong on the first try, but eventually I think this still start the extinction of translators.
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Thank you for answering my question I’ve asked earlier. I’d rather have a direct response but it is what it is.
I encourage everyone to deselect this in your games when they start enabling it for everyone. Just like it was said in the FAQ:
There are many users on the platform who can provide translations at any price brackets. I advise everyone to check them out in the #collaboration:portfolios section
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Will there be tools for developers to give context to words so that the automatic translation is more accurate? This would help for English words where one word can mean two totally different things, and the same word can be used as a noun or a verb.
I noticed that my game was being auto-translated to Russian even though I hadn’t added any Russian localization, and some of the words were out of context, causing things to be confusing. ‘Crane’ (as in the bird) translated to ‘Crane’ (as in the vehicle), and ‘Dust’ (as in the noun) was translated to ‘Dust’ (as in the verb) for Russian and Portuguese users.
Is there any support coming to be able to add specific word context like this so the automatic translation is better?
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Machine translations can’t distinguish the context of words better than humans.
Here is an example of Automatic Translation/Machine Translation:
The word Oynat/Play here means to play music was put here by Automatic Translation/MT.
But this is the login/join screen(I don’t know exactly what it is called) of a game, and this is a button that must be pressed to join the game. Automatic translation translated this word in the context of playing music.
There are many more errors/inaccuracies/incorrect translations like this.
Like unnecessary strings being translated, strings translated incorrectly, many strings not translated.
If we take Automatic Translation/MT for the Turkish language
Inaccurate translations will negatively affect developers and Turkish players
Most Turks don’t know English well, this is why most of them will not understand English words/phrases and will ask for translation in their own language.
But if the translations they want in their own language are to be this way, they may be disappointed.
Based on EF EPI 2019 (EF English Proficiency Index) results…
Another reason for that is that in Turkish there are words which have more than one meaning.
Yüz is a word with more than one meaning, it can mean:
- Face
- Hundred
- Swim! (second person singular imperative)
- To skin
So when you combine this with poor English skills, weird stuff happens. This applies not only to humans but also to machine translations.
I want to show you some pictures taken from real life. These are no different from machine translations.
They wanted to say Adana (special name) roll.
Dürüm means “roll” and durum means “status” in Turkish. Guess what they did. 
Mısır means both “Egypt” and “corn”. Again another victim of Turkish.
Döner means “döner kebab”, which is probably the only type of kebab you know ‘cuz it’s the most famous.
They translated döner as “returns” because döner is also (o)dön-er = “(he/she) return-s”
İskender is a type of döner kebab. It also means “Alexander”, you know, this guy:
I don’t even want to explain this 
See? Embarrassing…
There are many more examples like these.
Only what humans put in will come out. But what humans can put in isn’t everything they know, or feel. Translating is more than translating the words we see. A good translation conveys not only the words, but the intended meaning, word play, colloquials, hidden meanings and the mood of a text, as well. These can also be said for machine translations.
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I cannot say that I am confident in this update.
User feedback from my game has said that these automatic translations have done nothing short of absolutely butchering the presentation of my game. I have had people resorting to using VPNs to relocate to an English country because the translations in their native language are so unfathomably terrible that they’d rather read it verbatim in English. I don’t know if this is related or not or if I’m misinterpreting it (afaik it uses system language, not region).
The game in question relies on storytelling. Having the story mangled beyond recognition on the count of “expanding the platform”, or whatever the rationale for this change was, has only caused damage to the user experience on my game. This is unacceptable.
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Why are translations being forced onto manually translated games? I received so many complaints after so-called “additive” translations for entries I didn’t even work on, and even developers weren’t aware of that as it’s not made clear anywhere aside from a few devforum topics… Am I supposed to receive negative feedback from players because no one is properly notified about this? This change in particular is affecting both game owners and translators, it will be appreciated if a proper response in regards of the issue can be given, otherwise we’re getting blame for nothing. @RoxyBloxyy
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Terrible translations are provided by this system. Context matters, like told earlier in other replies.
In my game I use some jokes and stuff like that. If a bot translates them to other languages, it’s awful. A joke can’t be translated to another language, you can only pick a similar joke in the language you want to translate it to, something automatic translations can’t do. Talking about jokes, the entire system for automatic translations is a big joke.
I just manually turned off automatic translations for my games. No translations is better than automatic translations.
I’ll just stick around with humans.
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There is one for the manual translations. Doubt they’re using that one for the automatic translations tho.
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This is a massive step towards making Roblox games for a global audience! Thank you very much Roblox.
It will be interesting to see how good it actually is, or whether developers will still need to have a significant input to include and ensure the translations are accurate. Nonetheless, it sounds positive.
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Thank you Roblox! I have been waiting for automatic translations for a long time. None of my games have been localized yet and it is always been on the back of my mind that I should get my game supported in more languages. This is a significant update for every game developer.
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My only worry is this:
Does translated text on TextLabels only appear visually, or property wise too?
I feel like I had some if statements that check a certain text on a TextLabel (not very smart, I know), so Im wondering if that would still work?