Roblox is a leading company when it comes to bringing people together from all around the world. It’s even in their own mission statements. The number of users who play by country also back this up. Unfortunately, it seems like Roblox has forgotten about the one key feature that has helped, currently helps and will help in the future with bringing these goals into reality - the localization portal. We can no longer deny the fact that the Localization Portal has been basically abandoned by Roblox.
As a Translator that works on Roblox it gets more and more frustrating on a daily basis to deal with issues and bugs that have been reported. Some of them have been reported to Roblox since a feature has been introduced like the contributor report on the translator’s side or the cleaning up of the main page for the translator portal - there are at least 3 feature requests asking for this.
Over the least 3 years or so, translators have been reporting ideas and implementations as well as report bugs to help fix the localization portal but all of them have been met with either silence or stuck on the “we filed a ticket” response with no changes occurring. In the rare cases that users who report bugs and features get to talk to the engineering team behind localization on Roblox, they’re met with a lot of hostility and denial which makes trying to have a civil conversation difficult without needing to scream over each other.
This results in developers simply opting to use Automatic Translations which even those break and provide very low quality translations that real humans need to come in to fix.
Currently, the only way to circumvent those issues is to direct translators off-site to sites like Google Sheets or Crowdin which both require manual approval and in some cases, manually switching out the localization tables through studio in order to have it pushed to the newest servers. All of those options are incredibly translation unfriendly.
If Roblox were to work on this issue, it would help translators and developers who want their experiences to reach more than just English-fluent users a great deal as it would make localization on Roblox much easier and friendlier towards the community. This serves a great deal to anyone who wants to have an alternative to Automatic Translations which tend to fail the developers and in rare occasions introduce inappropriate language to the game without the headache that comes with the Translator Portal.