New Player Emulator Features: Pseudolocalization and Text Elongation

[BitwiseAndrea (Bitwise)]

Heeellooo Creeeaaatooors!

Localization is important, and making sure your experiences are well localized can be challenging! Testing in another language can be confusing or an easily forgotten QA step for those who are not familiar with other languages, and its how developers find pieces of text that are unlocalized, or places that UI needs to be tweaked to handle longer text.

To make localization QA easier we’ve added two new features to the Player Emulator!

The first is Pseudolocalization

This swaps out characters with similar, but different enough characters so that it’s easy to identify what strings are going through our Localization system.

For example…

• Builderman → ßúïℓδèř₥áñ
• Bloxy Cola → ßℓôж¥ Çôℓá
• Dominus Empyreus → Ðô₥ïñúƨ É₥ƥ¥řèúƨ

Enabling this will make it easy to identify unlocalized text without having to change your language.

And the second is our own invention… Text Elongation , also known as Spooky Text or Whale Speak

This elongates strings by a factor you define. There’s a little logic built in to try and keep the text “readable”, so if it’s possible, vowels (and emojis) are preferred characters to duplicate.

Examples…

• Builderman (30% longer) → Buuiildeerman
• Bloxy Cola (50% longer) → Bloooxyy Coolaa
• Dominus Empyreus (30% longer) → Doomiinuus Eempyyreus

Using this value will make it easy to identify places your UI might not be able to handle text thats longer than the default translated text. Spanish is on average 30% longer than English, and the equivalent for German is even higher. And as an added bonus: handling loooonger text is often the same fix as handling larger text, so if you are looking forward to supporting user-adjustable text sizes in your UI, these are great to test for at the same time!

Note: this will also only affect text that goes through our translation system.

We hope you find these new settings helpful in validating and improving the localization of your experiences, and hopefully, a little fun to use! Let us know what you think of these improvements, share any feedback, etc.

~ ßïƭωïƨèÂñδřèá / BiiitwiiiseeeAaandreeeaaa🌵

[0Tenth (QuackBack)]

It’s great to see more tools to empower developers to localize games easier, especially with the barrier lowered with things like automatic text translation! Side note, could the Text Eloooooongation algorithm be released ?

[bluebxrrybot (blueberry)]

Whhhyy doo wwwe need ouuurr text elloogonnatted?? I mean, it’s cool, but I’m having trouble understanding why? I do like that we can change our “location” in studio though! Will be useful for quickly testing translations without changing user settings or buying a passport to go to Europe.

[BitwiseAndrea (Bitwise)]

@BitwiseAndrea

Using this value will make it easy to identify places your UI might not be able to handle text thats longer than the default translated text. Spanish is on average 30% longer than English, and the equivalent for German is even higher. And as an added bonus: handling loooonger text is often the same fix as handling larger text, so if you are looking forward to supporting user-adjustable text sizes in your UI, these are great to test for at the same time!

TL;DR, some languages are longer than others, so accommodating longer text is an important thing to consider in UI development.

[gillern]

Good update but can Roblox just establish a studio UI team already? Having public production tools with UI that looks like a prototype made in half an hour and is inconsistent with other studio UI isn’t a great look for Roblox even if the UI is fully functional

[be_nj (benjj)]

At the risk of derailing the thread, what are you referring to exactly?

[itsBreakon (breakon)]

@gillern

aving public production tools

I think he’s referring to the fact theres a very clear inconsistency in ux and visual quality in different studio widgets, docks, official plugins, etc.

[gillern]

In the first announcement picture there’s switches overlapping and no padding. It feels like little effort goes into the design of these tools. There should be a studio UI QA process or team that ensures all new tools being developed have a consistent look and feel

[DiamondRoPlayz]

now this will help a lot to test all those things lol

[be_nj (benjj)]

Gotcha, thanks for being more specific. It helps!

I can’t speak to this particular window and it’s status but I will ask about it internally

[Xaoijin (Jinsu)]

Was always concerned whether ArePaidRandomItemsRestricted worked, this will work great in testing it out.

[a_swimsuit (The_Entity)]

i love this! such a silly way to help with localization but it makes so much sense!

[BitwiseAndrea (Bitwise)]

This is the before image - i gave the plugin a little bit of a UI refresh as part of adding these features.

[gillern]

Always good to polish the UI but shouldn’t be your job if you’re an engineer imo. Not trying to be disrespectful or anything just engineers are not UI designers

[jan12000p]

@BitwiseAndrea

Spanish is on average 30% longer than English

I see this in games that I play in Spanish, where the words end up clipped because the spanish version is way longer. For example: “Tools” vs. “Herramientas.”

This feature looks really interesting too.

[Ylsid]

Really great features. Since we’re talking about localisation I’d like to mention the localisation portal is in dire need of improvements.

The biggest offender is localisations are stored by source text, not by key. If we make a change to be source text in the source language, it’s going to break all translated languages. I ask why we have the key at all! This really needs a rework.

Next, there are too many conflicting ways to upload localisations. There’s a plugin which used to work, but now will create difficult to reconcile errors somewhere in the backend. Whatever old APIs it’s using should be taken offline.

Last, uploading a new localisation CSV doesn’t always work. Sometimes it fails for no reason, sometimes it fails because a key (i.e. source language) already exists. I ask why I wouldn’t want that key updated?

So while these are wonderful improvements, the meat of localisation needs improving with high priority in my opinion.

[nidbahn]

Some languages tend to have longer words, and your UI might not always fit them. That’s why

[ZacAttackk]

Both useful tools for localisation. Whale speak is akin to setting text elements as “OnlyTwentyCharacters” or “WWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWW” as placeholders as the longest possible usernames

Minecraft Pirate Speak support when?

[nothing_1649 (gom_a)]

we finally have drunk goggles for studio let’s go

jokes aside this is a really interesting feature i never really thought of, i’ve been worried about having my text scale correctly on ui but hadn’t had a way to test it but this is basically it