You don’t need translations. While they are great for getting your game to bigger audiences, if your unable to afford a translator you should probably focus on the english market first.
Also, automatic translations are horrible and will definitely leave a bad taste for other languages. If your a small dev that will definitely hurt a lot more than not having translations at all.
Considering the direction roblox is going, I don’t think that will be viable for much longer.
That depends on the developer. There are games that I worked on that benefited greatly from localization but I do agree. If you can’t afford translations, focus on securing an income for it or seek out translators that are in your price bracket.
I am sorry to burst your bubble here but Roblox isn’t necessarily a leading company in the AI space (if they are even anywhere near it) and there’s a lot of thought processes that go into translating context from one language to another. AI development is also tied in with researching the human brain and we don’t know enough about that to translate it into AI processing. Unless something really happens, I would give probably 20-30 years until AI might start coming close to being as good as a human translator.
What I meant is that, only having English translations may not be enough for much longer considering that roblox is opening in china and pushing very heavily in other languages and cultures.
I completely understand why you would do this, it’s a lot easier to use a automated translator instead of manual one but manual translators are better because they are translated by people who speech that language and know all about the language and automated ones are not perfect and get some things wrong, so overall I think you should change it back to manual translation.
Yeah I didn’t see that bruh lol.
All this effort should have been moved over to having outside US servers. It’s 100% unfair for me, as a brazilian, to play with someone that lives in the USA in a competitive game. I get at minimum 180ms. While people in the USA get their happy 50ms of latency. That would make people’s experience so much better, and most of the time not worse like this update.
I don’t understand how you’re drawing a connection between an update that relates to Roblox development and something that relates to player experience in a completely unrelated field.
When you say this makes people’s experiences worse, I strongly disagree. This update is crucial for smaller developers who cannot afford to hire translators and need to resort to something that costs nothing while they work there way up to being able to afford one.
As someone who speaks two languages and has tried out these features in other games, I can say confidently that it doesn’t work. It’s better to leave a game untranslated, than having a bad translation. A lot of people inside of countries like the US, ultimately think we’re dumb and we don’t know what most meaning for english words are, we can play games fine, we understand the basics for english gaming, like Play, Settings, there’s nothing hard about that. Roblox games don’t even work with translation in a way, because it’s usually simpler stuff. Story games usually do benefit from that. And nope, because these translations are SO BAD, they make your game worse for player experience which is ultimately what this wants to helps with, but auto translation DOES NOT WORK. In fact, bad translation in games can lead to players LEAVING your game. I don’t even play with roblox in Portuguese because translations are usually so innacurate, don’t make sense, that sometimes I have to think for 1 minute to understand something, when even if I didn’t know english and I read the english version I could understand.
That was a comment, this is ultimately about internacional player experience, and bad translation isn’t leading to anything. Server improvement for other countries has been asked for YEARS now, and from what I know there wasnt much of an statement or anything by Roblox.
It may not be the best right now, but it’s a new feature. Give it some time, and it will improve as advancements are made.
I firmly believe that even if the translation may be inaccurate, it’s still better for somebody who only speaks one language . It’ll give them an idea of what’s going on, rather than not knowing anything that’s going on because it’s in a foreign language for them.
We’re at a point where AI simply cannot, due to limitations in technology, replace an actual translator. However, I’m sure that even though it may be making mistakes right now, it’ll improve and that’s why it’s a good feature.
You say it makes player experience worse for story games. How so? What’s worse, in your opinion. Not being able to understand anything at all, or having a translation that’s semi-accurate. I’d go with the translation.
This doesn’t seem to be doing good. If anything the update is only good for the people that can’t hire translators, but what about all the people that do translation as their job? Automatic translation will never be as good as human translation, I say never meaning that it is extremely tough to compare a computer, versus someone who has studied a language their whole life, or grew up with that language. Overall this feels like a bad update, and doesn’t help many people.
People who can’t hire translators will use automatic translation until they feel they can afford to pay for what would be in this case, a premium. A real translator.
Those who can already afford it will likely not use automatic translation, and will hire a real translator for more accurate translations with less mistakes. I doubt this will hurt the demand for translators.
If google translate, the biggest translation program can’t do it, Roblox certainly won’t be able to.
This is not true, most people understand the basics and everything works fine. Auto translation NEVER helped me understand anything even when I did not understand English. It’s very innacurate, in a way that I had to CHANGE OVER TO ENGLISH to understand stuff.
What do you usually see as text in roblox games?
And these are all easily understandable. BUT.
Once you translate them, Play might become play in the sense of playing a song, “Tocar” which doesn’t work when asking someone to play something as in a game, and also “Tocar” can also be touch. You see what’s going on in here? Everything gets mixed up. When really you already understood what Play meant, but now it’s much harder and you have to start thinking WHY that was a translation. This is NOT just this example, there are hundreds of thousands.
And I definitely saw that example happen in Roblox games which were on the translation beta. Spoiler: ALOT of times.
This isn’t necessarily the case. Roblox understands that their translations need to be more optimized for games. As time moves on and this system improves, they’ll likely change words that are currently being mistranslated because of double meanings to be translated into what would be more accurate for games. For example, if Play is currently inaccurate but most games use Play in a specific sense, it could be modified.
I suppose you can refer to my comment on how Roblox will possibly optimize their translations for games and eliminate this issue. You also state here that most people understand the basics. That’s awesome, that means those who don’t can use the translations.
This seems like not a bad idea, but for me, a very bad idea. Some people may be living in a country in which they are not fluent in that country’s language. For example, I’m Japanese and I do visit Japan, but I am not fluent at reading Japanese. Thus, I will most likely not be able to read like 90% of the words since I do not have a choice.
How will text with a player’s username be translatted? If someone has a noun within their username and their username is on a textlabel, will the noun in the username get forcibly translated?
Well, this will be easier to translate your game. Though, is this gonna be like the Google Translate flashback time?
Not to mention languages like Mandarin have literal meanings for the words and it’s real meaning. So for example, "小笼包“ it literally means “small dragon bun” but it’s real meaning is “soup dumpling”. So if we have literal translations made by AI oh boy. Our games will be surely a wreck.
I’m honestly extremely concerned on how accurate this will be because almost every single translation software has issues translating and I worry that a lot of context with be lost in translation.
There’s seriously will be language translation issues. I doubt that this update is going to be similar to Google Translate, because as that, I dont really think that this update will help translate in different countries of the language stated. What if the translated version gone wrong?