Before I start elaborating on this issue, please note that I will only take into account Russian translations, as I can’t analyze languages I don’t know. If you speak a different language and encounter the same problem, please reply to this topic and elaborate on incorrect machine translations.
As a Russian player, it is currently impossible to understand automatic translations. Front page games with thousands of players use machine translations that heavily distort the meaning, which leads to confusion and lack of fundamental understanding of the game. Of course, it is common sense that machine translations are not supposed to be accurate because they were implemented to help players remotely understand the game. But from what I see, for the most part, machine translations do not function as intended for the reasons I mentioned above. On the grounds of this, many players either stop playing automatically translated games or change their Roblox language to English indefinitely to avoid confusing translations.
P.S The majority of examples were not included for multiple reasons
Massive difference in Russian and English grammars makes it hard to explain everything
Adding all examples would consume a lot of my time
P.S.S
Developers are not to blame for using machine translations.
Why is this a problem? Despite potential short-term increases in the statistics, we can expect:
Significantly degraded player experience
Negative feedback from international communities
Players will change their platform language to English; therefore, a lot of quality translations will be ignored
Decreased engagement
In the current state, machine translations for certain languages will never be remotely as good as human ones nor somewhat accurate, which means they do not function as it was originally intended.
upd. I am also aware of inappropriate translations for Russian and Korean, but adding them to the topic as examples would be against the forum rules.
I think this is a problem inherent to machine translation rather than something Roblox specifically could fix. The only solution I can think of would be to prompt the user when there’s ambiguity (e.g. “Is ‘TAGGED’ an Adjective or Verb in this context?”)
I 100% agree with you, it is logically not possible to automatically translate some languages, and this statement is based on grammar complexity alone. But I’m trying to make a different point here. As many people already know, Roblox presented this feature as a panacea for all illnesses by promising nearly high-end translations, which is not true (referring to RDC). Regardless of whether this is fixable or not, the current state of translations doesn’t reflect on promised functionality, which is why this bug report was made. At the end of the day, it is Roblox players who have to experience unpleasant translations.
Although I do believe machine translation has helped many developers quickly port their games to other languages, I do also believe that the way Roblox marketed this feature as “near to natural language” was completely inappropriate and should instead have been marketed as a temporary solution for quick language support.
David Baszucki had told me during Virtual RDC 2020 that it would be a completely accurate feature (quote: “Yes, thoroughly tested; performs almost equal to real”), as well as during the Q&A session where this statement was repeated. This struck me as odd after having expressed genuine concern to him, especially after learning all the potential flaws in this machine translation feature.
Nothing will replace human translation, and this will be reflected in most games where Roblox translators have been working for years and the creators see value in international user retention.
As a final comment, this very issue (bad automatic translation) is where human, community-sourced efforts came into place since many (even Roblox) thought having a few translators may be too little for the number of content updates of some games, and it seems this automatic translation feature has just started to show the flaws that many of us feared but knew it would have.
I guess the way to interpret is that whatever engagement metric Roblox is using is not a good correlation to how well the content is actually translated, or that the quality of translation doesn’t actually affect engagement much at all (seems unlikely, but if the data says so then the data doesn’t lie).
Doubt they are not being truthful about it being tested. It’s likely just an issue of the metric being used.
Obviously there’s use for UI buttons using single word translations like having a button automatically translate “stop” to “arrêt” is easy enough, but paired with a good icon/colour choice can allow most people to infer meaning regardless of language. But anything conveying anything more complex than like three words is just a pipe dream.
It’s honestly pretty surprising that Roblox even attempted an automatic translation feature. Ever since I heard about the feature over a year ago I knew it wouldn’t work because understanding text in a language you barely know is still more favourable than an inaccurate text in a language you do know.
Like, what copy translators did they talk to that said this was a good idea before moving forwards on the feature?
There has been multiple occassions in which I’ve seen lots of mistakes when playing a game with Spanish automatic translations set up. AI cannot detect context, which might cause textlabels to be localized and not making sense at all.
A game with wrong and broken translations isn’t appealing. Although David Baszucki confirmed in RDC 2020 that their AI implemented for translations was going to be at least 95% accurate, I do feel the numbers are way lower.
One major disadvantage of AI translations is that they cannot detect the tone, context or presentation of a phrase. Though i am not a translator specifically, many of my translator friends have told me about the errors in the translation of MANY games which use AI translation.
I am not completely against the AI translations as they have certainly helped the smaller developers quickly add translations to their games without emptying their wallets but honestly, i feel like if people can afford, then they should try to hire specific translators for certain languages.
Moreover, AI translation cannot translate text in image labels, something which can only be done if the developers work with translators.
so true man
games like piggy and tower heroes made me throw up when i saw the translation
i haven’t seen the tower heroes one yet but i saw in the chat they called branch “sucursal” and that’s a word for road branch which is pretty bad
people in the spanish community are probably going to laugh at it and dislike the game thinking the game’s bad but it’s not, the translations are
same with piggy i remember seeing that no character names were translated except for piggy (which makes no sense) and it would also translate dialogue and custom build mode notes, which is pretty bad considering the AI never knows the context so it just looks weird
to be honest the AI translations look like aliens tried to write a dialogue after watching a 1 minute video of people talking
Hey @MemeProduced - thanks for your report. We recognize that machine translations can be inaccurate, especially for complex sentences/languages. That being said, we’ve seen that automatic translations, even if imperfect, do in most cases help players go from no understanding at all to at least basic understanding of an experience.
We have been continuously improving our machine translation model and will continue to do so. We’ve also launched a language selector within experiences, which enables players to switch languages on an experience-by-experience basis. This means switching languages due to poor translation quality in one experience doesn’t mean players will miss out on high quality translations in others. We’re also planning to roll out an automatic translation update process early next year, which will enable us to replace old, inaccurate translations with better ones when we update our model.
As improving automatic translations is an ongoing process that doesn’t have a strict end, I’ll be marking this report as closed. However, please know translation quality is top of mind for us and we are always working on it!