It appears translated only visually.
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Same in Portuguese. I was playing a game the other day and saw “Costas” (“espalda” in Spanish) instead ou “Voltar” /“Atrás”.
That’s why context is everything.
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Super excited by this.
How does this handle dynamic text? For example, I have dialogue systems that send dialogue packets to the client to render, and then they are presented to the client through a ‘typewriter’ effect. Are the translations only for static objects or would these be affected too?
As someone who speaks Japanese quite well, it will defer to “私” (watashi) and this will not cause great havoc. The ever-so-slightest bit of context will be lost, but 私 is neutral enough that nobody (really) cares.
I do like this update enough. When there’s ambiguity, such as in “Play” buttons, people should just manually translate that string, and we’ll have less problems. My main problem with it, though, is that not enough people will actually do the above, so we’ll get buttons telling people “espalda”.
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The one thing that is bothering me is if Roblox is using in-house automatic transalation or Google Translate, because I speak decent Spanish and some of the stuff that Google Translate has translated harmless sentences to could be moderated on Roblox.
How does this deal with text changes in real-time? I programmatically change texts a lot without taking translation into account. Will my games look ok for non-English speakers?
Expect a lot of spam in your translations table.
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I don’t really see why devs would settle for a “”“”“”“translation”“”“”“”“”“”" service that makes their games look amateurish (enjoy having text popping out of your GUIs or nonsensical mistranslations)
I’d love to see more info on the test results you guys have regarding Automatic Translation.
Did these games happen to already have manual translated strings beforehand? What age demographics showed better retention? What languages/countries responded better to it? Were players questioned about the perceived quality of the translations?
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Really looking forward for this! Definitely a way of helping out smaller developers and even covering strings of game updates that might not be translated in time. Good job, Roblox!
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Please make this opt in. I’ve heard developers in this thread saying that the translation has poor grammar. And how would we know if it doesn’t translate it into inappropriate words? And would we get punished because of your faulty translator? Unless it’s very accurate I’d be fine with it, but this is exactly what I’ve feared when I heard this at RDC 2020. Please make it opt in. And also I’ve heard in this that the translator has be overriding the manually translated ones. Also how would it detect context?
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Good to see Roblox expanding their horizons to help users from other countries understand English based games.
It’d be funny though and the memes are where it really counts.
My game is translated into several languages already, but does not use the translation tools on the website, due to most text content in my game constantly changing during runtime. Instead I use a completely custom system where strings are looked up from a table based on the users locale information.
Will the automatic translation system override my translations in any way? Is there a way for me to disable automatic translation in my game?
I wouldn’t rely on automatic translation due to complications or bad detection, this might lead to bad translation or even worse… this might ruin Roblox’s player base from other countries or repetition as well… I’d rather have it being manual than automatic.
(This is my opinion)
Also instead of Rolling this out to all games maybe have beta testers Opt-in for testing in there games only to see what it is like. I’d also have it so people can enable or disable this so people like translators can do there job… 
This should definitely be an optional feature, not forced for all games
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Keep helping the community in different ways!
Most likely a downgrade. To replace jobs from verifiable and legitimate translators who have actual experience in localization with an AI not only falters the accuracy of translation, but means that a large community of people who actually work to localize a game will have a significant source of income shut down as more developers would most likely rely on unreliable AI that would mistranslate many terms and mitigate the actual experience of a game.
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Don’t even forget that AI does not utilize, nor understand separate lines of text and how they can change the context of intent in foreign language. Without the context necessary to maintain clarity to a player most likely means for a mistranslation. Even if this system is implemented, I strongly advise other devs to work with actual translators: paying people in order to keep the authenticity of your game to foreign players, while being able to stabilize and uphold the incomes of the translator community is important.
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Guess you didn’t read this:
- No! Automatic translations will always be additive so we will never override any human translations that you have in place and will only translate any untranslated entries.