This is a terrible update in my opinion, and I think many can agree with me here. To roll out translations, they definitely could’ve hired human translators, as having a good system for translations is vital in the expanding of Roblox’s market. Employing an automated program also replaces the need for talented translators who work their butts off for this?
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I don’t see a problem with this, seems good. Maybe have some translators to make sure it is correct
What’s the quality of these translations some words in English can translate to swears in other languages.
As bad as it will be, I feel like it should be an option to turn it on not a requirement, because it isn’t to and for smaller devs such as myself even tho it’s not great but we cant offered better ones, but to larger developers who can and do pay translaters they need to have the ability to turn it off
I didn’t understand from this post that automatic translation will be mandatory. Until now, it was an option for selected developers.
Developer hub page
In my opinion, this update seems good for small developers like me, but for bigger developers, this can cause A lot of foreign players to stop playing, due to translations being done very poorly, sometimes even coming out as NSFW. I believe that if Roblox really wants to pump out this update, they will have to work a lot harder and get translators to actually translate words and not having google doing it for them.
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Is it possible to disable/enable this feature?
I don’t understand. Aren’t translators enough?
Absolutely awful idea
Automatic Translations are not accurate whatsoever and no just that but all languages have words for their own, therefore we also have words just for our languages that are untranslatable and when they try it wont turn out well. And we can tell it wont be good on the site because of the state normal features are in, really think twice about this roblox!
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auto translations aren’t absolutely awful but
- there will be less job for translators
- people will probably just auto translate their games for the sake of saving money even though they could very well afford translations and end up just providing a meh experience for players that don’t speak english
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In my opinion this is a horrible idea. Please don’t do this
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Nice update 
Seeing Roblox go global is exciting, as I don’t see too much friends in Japan who plays on Roblox 
Anyways, my standing point about this update goes around the medium between yay and nay, because knowing the current translation technology, I am worried of whether if the translated text will always appear positively, as discussed in the posts above (which have argued about certain words that are completely fine turn into swear words in their language).
However, I personally believe that shorter texts will probably appear better than long paragraphs, so perhaps having a text size limit to auto translate will be useful to developers. If possible, I would like to see this as a feature of allowing developers set the threshold of how long the text can be for machine translation to handle it, and rely on human translators for any texts beyond that limit.
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Oh, I didnt realize I thought it was mandatory
“The memes” is what makes parents pull their children away from the platform and ruin reputations. They aren’t funny either. If you like them, good for you but the actually professional devs would definitely avoid being an offensive meme potential.
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i mean…this quins the whole translator job, and automatic translation is not 100% accurate… i dont know if this is a good idea right now…
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The comment was meant as a joke my guy, but this is a big concern. Especially since big automatic translators like Google Translate even gets the spanish word for poop wrong.
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I was part of a translation team outside of Roblox some years ago, translating text from English to French and In our team we had some people that used google translate, I was able to spot all of the automatic translation. Why? Because they all missed the point, the context of the words and how they where being used, while automatic translation is an incredible tool, that really can and probably will become reliable in the future thanks to artificial intelligence, as of today its not good enough for an entire platform to start automatically translating strings in games whiteout any human review before.
Automatic translator are known to fail most of the time and outputting incorrect information. This will lead to some games being translated terribly, which will cause some players to feel discomfort and start proving hateful sentiments and thoughts against the developers of those games.
While I see why Roblox wants to roll out this update, I do not think that with the technologies we have access today and in the next decade, that such project would work in a positive way.
The idea behind is good and would lead to an incredible amount of players feeling more welcomed to games, but the execution is terrible and It will cause more problems than anything else, with players told in there language how to do something by game tutorials, but because it was wrongly translated, by the automatic translator, they will get stuck, not understanding why they will leave the game with frustration.
The famous automatic corrector failed to work years ago and still fails today, translation is way harder than that, why would an entire platform release such a thing.
[EDIT]
Lets edit this so that I can add rapidly done example because its really too late for me to do a proper one.
Let me translate 5 sentences from the Move Toll found in F3X Building Tools, from English to French using an automatic translator (google.translate.com) then do my own translation.
First one the name of the tool
English : Move Tool
Google : Outil de déplacement
Me : Déplaceur de Pièce
Comment : Google did putout a good translation but for the context I would personally say that using the word “mover” in French would be better and probably the “de pièce” part could be removed.
Second one the description :
English : Allows you to move parts.
Google : Vous permet de déplacer des pièces.
Me : ()
Comment : Google did an amazing job, its exactly how I would have said it, maybe without the “vous” to make it more familiar, but this one is perfect.
Third one, the explanation of the axes title :
English : Axes
Google : Haches
Me : Axes
Comment : Google completely failed, and this would trow off some people, “haches” is the tool, the one to chop down trees, while in the context the word “Axes” wasn’t used to speak about the tool but about axes points to move parts.
Fourth one, the description of the Axes :
English : This options let you choose in which direction to move each part.
Google : Ces options vous permettent de choisir dans quelle direction déplacer chaque pièce.
Me : ()
Comment : Google once more, good job, as always I wouldn’t use “vous” and would just skip it to make it more familiar.
Last one, a random tip :
English : TIP : Click on any part to focus the handle on it.
Google : ASTUCE: cliquez sur n’importe quelle pièce pour focaliser la poignée dessus.
Me : ASTUCE : Clique sur n’importe quelle pièce pour centrer l’outils dessus.
Comment : While my translation is not perfect it stills makes people understand what the tools is for, while google completly failed, taking the “handle” literally and translating it like it was a door handle or an actual handle.
Out of 5 translation, which were quite nice, 2 are completely wrong (the third and last one), 2 contains unnecessary pronouns which could be removed to make the translation more familiar (the fourth and second one), and 1 is not the best but would still work (the first one).
Its not that automatic translations tools are a complete waist, but they cannot be trusted for such a big task.
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Like with the china announcment we got a few days ago, I don’t see why people are mad here. This is great for roblox and will help out smaller developers who can’t afford money on translators. Plus its done much much faster!
They’ve quite literally said
so I have no clue why you’re all disregarding that…
You’re ignoring people who were in the tests as the developer or the translator. Both of the groups are saying that the localization was terrible.
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Yes, but without automatic translation how are small developers supposed to maybe get their games out there? They don’t have the money to spend on translators.
It’s kinda ignorant of everyone here to assume that every single developer is loaded with cash and can afford translators. Less then 0.01% of roblox developers actually make enough money to afford translators.
This update is not meant for you (or anyone here), its meant for those that cant afford translator fees.
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