Crowd Sourced Translations using Crowdin

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#1

Hey, recently I’ve been trying to use Crowdin to enable crowd sourced translations for one of my Roblox experiences.

Problem

The problem I have is that Crowdin does not have a Roblox integration and there are no guides online I could find on how to use Crowdin for translating Roblox experiences.

Explanation

I’ve looked that these articles below on how to implement such system but wasn’t successful.

From my understanding, to translate

  1. The user first would need a Roblox account
  2. The user needs to inform me to be added as a translator
  3. I need to send a invite to the user
  4. The user needs to accept the invite

This process can be tedious and provides a lot of friction. Instead of anyone being to set a translation they would to go through this long process which really doesn’t scale well when you have many users trying to translate. When compared to Crowdin, you need only an account and then join the project. After that they can start instantly translating and proofreading translations.

Even if I do automate adding translators on Roblox there is no proper moderation system to be able to rollback translations in case a translation is incorrect or worse. There is no translation up voting or approval needed so you can set it to anything you want.

Crowdin requires a set amount of up votes and approvals from other translators to be selected. Even so I can easily roll back translations and even roll back translations for entire users in case they somehow get enough up votes and approvals.

In short, I do not want to use Roblox’s translation portal system as it is extremely flawed when compared to Crowdin

Attempted Solution

I have thought of downloading the CSV file and uploading to Crowdin but that has problems.

  • I need to manually upload the CSV file to Crowdin every time a new string is added (So basically every time any development is happening which)
  • When a new translation on Crowdin I need to download from Crowdin and then upload on Roblox
  • If there a new translation is on Crowdin but a new string on Roblox they could be file conflicts
    • Basically I am left with either uploading the Roblox translations to Crowdin which will override the new translation needing it to be retranslated, or upload to Roblox which means I need to wait for that string to be detected again before adding to Crowdin

Question

Is there any way to get Roblox to sync translations with Crowdin?

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#2

You are expected to do this yourself. I’m currently working on a project that also translate on Crowdin. We notify the devs whenever we finish translating/proofreading, so the new translations can be uploaded. It’s a tedious process, but when compared to the current state of the Translators Portal, we prefer this method more.

This is the expected behavior. You will need to go through each strings which has been modified or manually add new strings in.

I’m not sure what you mean here. Are you relying on Automatic String Capture to detect strings or are you manually adding them?

Strings do take quite some time to get fully added into the portal. If your game isn’t launched yet, ask your testers to stay around longer for the system to work.

Based on both Roblox’s and Crowdin’s documentation, they all suggest manually downloading and uploading .csv files. Crowdin does offer Content Delivery for instant update, but I’m not sure how this can be implemented within Roblox.

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