Automatic Translation on DevForum

Updates Announcements
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Hi Creators,

We are excited to bring you automatic translation for DevForum! Starting today, DevForum will automatically translate to the language you’ve selected on your main Roblox account. Many of you use a Roblox language other than English, and this feature will allow you to seamlessly interact with other DevForum users in your native language.

How it Works

If you’d like to enable automatic translation, just navigate to your account and select your desired language. If you already have a non-English language selected, DevForum will automatically translate.

You’ll now see all topics/replies in that language. If you’d like to revert to a post’s original language, just click the ‘revert’ button. This will return all content on the thread to its original language.

You can also respond to others in your native language. DevForum will automatically translate your responses into everyone else’s languages so they can see your topics and replies. So if you have ‘English’ selected as your www language, you’ll be able to read topics/replies posted in other languages. :slight_smile:

Sunsetting ‘Interface Language’

As part of this update, we’ll also sunset the ‘Interface Language’ feature in DevForum. This menu controls the language for DevForum menus and buttons. Instead of a specific DevForum language for its interface, we’ll sync DevForum’s UI components to your Roblox account language. So, whatever language you use for Roblox will also be used for DevForum navigation.

This means you can only use the DevForum interface with languages available on the Roblox website. If you’re currently using a DevForum interface language that we don’t support in Roblox (e.g. Hindi, Armenian, Georgian, etc.), your DevForum navigation will now sync to your www language in Roblox. Your www language is the ‘universal’ control that determines website language as well as DevForum navigation and translation.

What’s Next

Please let us know how everything works! Thank you in advance for your thoughtful feedback.

Stay tuned for more DevForum improvements. :slight_smile:

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Awesome I can now reply to spanish people insulting me.

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Cool, now we don’t have to use translators. Now I can answer the English who offended me.

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My first thought is that I was worried about this reducing the overall quality of conversation on the DevForum because there will be a barrier caused by automatic AI translations attempting to capture nuance. I don’t have a huge level of confidence in AI’s ability to perform translations of technical topics in a way that communicates the important details.

If as an example I say “Rojo” (referring to the tool for enabling Roblox devs to store their code and assets on the file system), I do not trust that to not get translated to “Red” by machine translation despite it being a proper noun. It’s a very real concern, because this sort of thing has already come up on Discord and GitHub when people mention Rojo.

My second thought is that it’s probably going to be quite difficult to reduce the quality of the DevForum’s discussion any, so I guess whatever.

Is this going to include some sort of restructuring so that the Roblox Drama of the Month doesn’t render update posts unusable? The latest ordeal with Roblox’s moderation has resulted in announcement posts like this being flooded with spam about it, and it’s been getting on my nerves.

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Devforum translating? Sunsetting Interface language? That’s good! We can speak in different languages in the devforum!

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Hey, great point about ‘Rojo.’ We’ll be watching for this and other situations like that.

As for update posts, thanks for the heads up, ideally conversations should be confined to the topic at hand. We are thinking carefully about how to communicate announcements to avoid spam.

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It would be appreciated if there could be a toggle. My mothers tongue is french, but that doesn’t mean I’m not fluent in english

I’ve set the language of my roblox account to english, because well, the internet’s language is english, but I doubt everyone who isn’t a native english speaker (but still fluent) does

Well tbh, for the chat translation on roblox, I would like if it didn’t translate french or english (so like being able to have multiple languages on an account). My sister was talking once to me in a game, in very broken english, and I seriously thought she was joking or it was slang I didn’t understand, but nope, came to realize later that her messages were being translated from french to english (the option to show untranslated messages was off, because for some reason, it keeps turning itself off???)

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A big issue is that on topic posts are likely to get moderated, while the “spam” doesn’t

And I say “spam” in quotes because I do believe they have some value, but I’d put them in a subcategory of Development Discussion

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Although no. Not great. The translation is a bit clumsy. The topic is translated, but there is no comment at all. And the translator does not translate.

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It takes a sec to switch after you change your www language, is it working now?

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Cool update! Though I’m afraid (since I speak Arabic for example which has a lot of dialects as well to it) that some words would be mistranslated if I were wanting to know a specific application for example or tool. I feel the those terms would be misrepresented due to the language barrier is there an option to example to have a certain word not auto translate so they understand?

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we are livin’ la vida loca-lization!!!

Absolutely love this update as it unlocks forums for so many developers.

As someone who uses the app in another language for practice but stumbles when introduced to complicated concepts, i’d love the way to specify Forum language separately from my app / website language.

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I’d also love a way to see the original post behind some toggle. Having this tooltip pointing out if it was translated is super helpful!
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You can use the ‘revert’ toggle to leave translation on/off on forum, check out the gif in the post!

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I find the whole language stuff on the forum interesting. From devrel to entire different communities with events and even the Chinese version of the forum (entirely different site).

I assume the language communities won’t leave at all. More would be cool to see also.

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also i think dialects might be a problem as well - or is there an option to see which dialect it is, e.g egyptian arabic has some words different/spelling than proper arabic.

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Sorry, I already found the problem and fixed it.

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Btw - the languages we currently support are English, Spanish, Russian, Portuguese, Vietnamese, French, Korean, German, Japanese, Italian, and Chinese.

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I think this is a very good update.
Actually, I had been bothered by the fact that some buttons on the page would stop responding when I used the translation function, but this problem has been resolved!
I have one question: what translation engine are you using?
Google Translate? DeepL? Or something else?

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bring automatic translation to the baltic countries​:folded_hands::folded_hands::folded_hands::folded_hands: