We’re excited to share that we’re rolling out automatic translation updates. We know many of you use automatic translations to localize your experiences, and we are always working to update Roblox Translate to improve the quality of automatic translations.
As our machine translation model improves, more accurate translations may become available for existing strings. When these updates become available, we will refresh translations. Automatic translation updates will appear in your translation history.
If you have a translation that you never want to change, you can lock the entry to ensure it will not be impacted by updates:
However, please note that by locking an entry, you are approving the translation and turning it into a manual entry. This means it will not be impacted by any automatic translation updates, including safety-related updates. If, in the future, it is found that the translation violates policy, your experience will still be subject to moderation.
Unlocking Translation Entries
By default, manually added strings and strings with manual translations will be locked. If you unlock an entry, it will be impacted by both automatic translation updates and ATC if it is enabled. If you previously changed or cleared a translation but want to generate a new automatic translation, you can unlock the entry to do so.
You can learn more by reading the localization guide docs. Please let us know if you have any questions or feedback. Thanks!
“safety-related updates”
RIP to some random dev who doesn’t know the language and locked an automatic translation that looked/sounded pretty but was actually really vulgar /j
In all seriousness, are developers made aware when a translation update is safety-related?
That’s some great news! I’ve been having some issue with the automatic translation translating completely the opposite what it meant in the first moment. And the new lock and unlock translations will help a lot me and my translators team!
Why is auto-translation not available to me when my main game language is set to Russian? I can’t use English by default, as my game is mainly oriented to the CIS Audience, where most of the audience speaks Russian.
upd. I noticed in the documentation that Roblox only uses 1 source language by default. Then the question arises - When will there be other languages already?
Will we ever see crowd sourced translations added or support for using external platforms for translation like Crowdin?
Currently I have a lot of community members wanting to fix or add a translation but with how it is now I would need to add them as a translator which isn’t practical when you have multiple translators with most only wanting to fix one thing.
If an integration with Crowdin be added I can better manage translations and allow my community to translate as well as proofread translations.
I love the locking feature. I was previously having issues with automatic translation overwriting my manual translations and now I can prevent this from happening!
Speaking of another translation for Roblox. When will we see Spanish for the automatic translation for chat? I’m sick of Spanish not being translated. Also please add German to the chat translator.
The lock/unlock feature is awesome! Manual entries being impossible to “unlock” has been a huge pain point for me in the past.
Will we see support for locking and unlocking experience and product names and descriptions? This only seems to cover experience strings at the moment.
any news on the localisation page still being used for spam? i don’t think i’ve received any more but i don’t like seeing the page being exclusively filled with advertising crap
Locking translations is an amazing feature, but I’m not quite a fan of holding creators accountable for translations that later violate policy. I’d prefer more creator protections than the looming threat of moderation for every single misstep.
Policy on Roblox is ever-changing and so is language and connotations, especially for Western nations (English). Knowing that, it’s difficult to want to use the locking feature and instead just leave absolutely everything to automatic translation. Though I can at least see using it for things that would unambiguously never be against policy, and that’s probably why it exists to begin with which then would make the moderation threat a non-concern.
I like this update a lot, however, there is no way to “unlock” Experience Information translations. If I have previously added a manual translation, but I decide I want it to be automatically translated, it does not allow me to do so because it is locked. It does not auto translate even if the description is blank and auto translate for Experience Information is turned on.
