Not going to assume, but. Isn’t this going to screw over translator developers? I can’t speak for them, as I am a modeler and voice actor, but some devs obviously translate as their job. I kind of feel this would screw them over. 
I doubt the automatic translation is going to be anywhere near as good as an actual translator so this is mainly for games that were never going to translate their games anway because they couldn’t afford to. Then the developers with larger budgets will hire translators to produce better quality translations.
Can someone explain this to me? I’m not fully understanding this part.
From my experience, I can certainly say that Automatic Translations are not the way to go. Even though Roblox says that they’ve been working on this technology for a couple years, I highly doubt it’ll be effective. For comparison, Google Translate first launched in 2006. That’s over 14 years ago! Google have had a lot of time for developing Google Translate, yet it still isn’t perfect and sometimes the translations go horribly wrong.
6 Likes
My only issue here is the possible abuse and bypassing this can bring. As wonderful as this is, could we possibly see generated data from the world-wide tests such as success and failure?
If I want a careless translation, I’m gonna use google translate, there are so many services like it, and plus, if I do it manually I can always avoid errors or unwanted translations, I’m sorry but I just see this as useless. (except for the fact that it works with all lunguages, and is already set up?), in conclusion, if hiring is high quality and google translate is mid-quality, this is pretty bad.
I think this feature would be nice for some. Temporary translations are nice, absolutely, however I do think it’s important to hire someone to translate these strings in the future.
1 Like
Is this safe. When messing around on google translate a few dodgey translations to so not appropriate words. Example: Te amo - I love you andthat was not even the words i put in!!
Dont add this it ia better to not have a translation than a dodgy one. A dodgy translations in some games, Piggy, Other games with storys. Can completly change the entire story of the game.
Worst feature ever!
1 Like
I will recomend like a way of you being able to allow just certain parts of the text to be translated, like using rich text for example.
or something like that.
And what will happen with localization service, will it still work?
it will just be like a normal translator, nobody can make an computer program that can find the right word with the right meaning right now. So this is probably just gonna be an roblox tranlsator 2.0 because automatic translation existed for a while now.
This is actually a very useful feature as long as the translations come out to be correct (which is hard to believe considering how some languages have their own specifics, which translations could not imitate in any way possible). Hopefully this will be a huge step further into making people understand eachother better regardless of their nationality on the platform.
However, this might have a sort of impact on the educational part. Myself, I am a russian. And when I started playing ROBLOX, it inspired me to learn English language so I could communicate with other people in game. With the translations, I suppose people won’t be interested in learning the language as before.
Either way I hope that translations will be an optional thing for players to have.
I did not want this to be turned on. I had no way of knowing this would be enabled by default. Now I have to go through and delete every auto-translated (often very incorrectly so) entry, each of which is hard to separate out from the manually translated entries.
I’ve developed a method to figure out which is automatic and which is manual by seeing which languages are listed under each entry when I press Delete, but doing this for every translation entry is going to take a while.
4 Likes
Machine translation cannot translate context
Computers are good at dealing with things which are well defined. Languages are not well defined, translation even less so. There are many examples of badly translated books that were done by human professional translators so if even they don’t have a good way of ensure they are translating well computers have no chance.
It comes down to the fact that language is hard. You can change one word in a sentence and have it mean something completely different. Or you can have two sentences that have almost no common words but mean the same thing. The same word can have many meanings depending on context both within the sentence and within the wider context of the text. Phrases can mean different things based on arbitrary things like historic and social context.
A language is always linked to its culture, so no matter how perfect a translation is, if the cultural elements of the language aren’t taken into account, the translated text will fail to communicate to the readers in the same manner as the writer intended.
I will show a few screenshots of the difficulties/problems a German & Dutch translator has with Automatic Translations:
- The inability of Automatic Translations to understand the sentence and translate it correctly
- Translation and incorrect translation of the string that should not actually be translated
- Major difficulties with translators trying to correct all of them due to incorrectly translated strings. This is really hard, he needs to check them all out and not miss any strings. Manually translated strings were automatically retranslated.
Thus, we have seen once again that Machine Translations do not provide accurate translations and that no matter how much improvement is tried, it will most likely fail.
Although a useful feature for developers who cannot afford translators, it may not be very useful for those developers.
Automatic translations that do not translate languages accurately can cause major problems for players around the world.
As a result of the incorrect translation of languages, players around the world will not be able to understand even the sentences in their own/native language, and even prefer ENGLISH to their own/native language.
If you are a developer who can afford to hire a Translator, I would definitely recommend hiring a human translator.(of course real human translators 
)
And if you are a developer who cannot hire translators, you should consider this again when using automatic translations. Instead of attracting players, you could lose players from around the world.
7 Likes
It seems like it was enabled today. A lot of games I work on has doubled or even tripled in string count and causing general chaos among my co-workers. As well as one of the games I dev has added translations that we weren’t planning on. It would have been nice if we got a heads-up that this was happening. I’m really tired of the terrible communication between us and the staff.
3 Likes
I am absolutely very mad at this update. I have to unenable dozens of my games that are active and use labels, IN STUDIO! It is extremely tedious to go through studio and unenable the translations. Considering it takes 1-2 minutes per game, it’d mean I could take well over 30 mintues to an hour to do it! This waste peoples’ time for those who don’t want it, just another factor which leads to people not wanting to be on this platform. Roblox keeps pushing out updates which are time consuming to fix, like new properties for objects, removal of certain things, etc. Is it a good path? Maybe for some people it helps, but for the majority not wanting to overhaul all their work just to make it playable, is not the right way for Roblox to handle our works in the first place.
4 Likes
I don’t mind the machine translations but would have appreciated it if Automatic Text Capture wasn’t suddenly enabled. Obby Creator’s string count has increased by almost 50% with random strings that I didn’t add manually. Will need to remove them all now which is a bit annoying, to be honest!
3 Likes
I really don’t appreciate the fact that I wasn’t warned about the fact that automatic translation and automatic text capture were going to be enabled by default. I prefer paying for manual translations instead of having machine translations for my games, so this automatic change was unexpected and not very welcome.
4 Likes
Automatic translations have broken the current translation tables. Hope this is fixed soon.
1 Like
Hey all,
If the release of automatic translation support is something that you would like to disable for your game, you can do so by going into your game’s Configure Localization page, navigating to the Settings tab, disable the Automatic Text Capture setting and flush the table. Flushing of the table will remove any automatically scraped text that has an automatic translation or no translation. This will NOT impact any scraped entry with a manual translation or any manually added entries.
We want to acknowledge a point that many of you have brought up in this thread regarding contextual translations. We understand that Roblox is a unique domain and translating content within our games is often difficult without the proper contextualization. Our team is working on further optimizations to automatically derive context to make our translation quality better. We also want to reiterate that we have done extremely rigorous testing and analysis prior to moving forward with this launch and have seen a positive impact directly on all players, especially new ones.
We appreciate your patience and support as we continue to push forward here on our vision on connecting audiences around the world on Roblox!
27 Likes
Why not make the setting manual, not forced? No one will see your reply, out of 37 developers I’ve worked with, 5 people at max saw this topic, not talking about your reply alone. Now machine translations got mixed up with manual ones, and we can’t do anything about it. I also would like to mention that it is not my job to properly inform my clients about localization breaking updates.
Just to clarify a few things, I hold no grudge against machine translations. People who pay for localization are aware of how terrible the feature in question is, which is why it does not affect my client-flow. But I do hate the fact that it is interfering with the job I’m doing, and developers are not liking it.
9 Likes