Currently on roblox, in terms of language I find roblox treats Englishmen and and Americans as being able to speak the same language. And while in all honesty, i’m not here to argue that they are different ‘languages’ but some of the translations could and are really confusing to any young English players on the platform.
An example?
In English, ‘Pants’ is a term for underpants, while in American ‘Pants’ is the equivalent of our trousers.
Now while you may think this is common sense, if you got your average 8 year old roblox user From England, they honestly would not understand these sort of differences, due to language barriers.
Another, less problematic example is how Americans say ‘flashlight’ and someone from England says ‘torch’ .
I would also like the ability for standard English translations on the translator portal, since currently it is impossible to have separate translations for both people from England, and people from America without building our own custom systems.
As a Roblox developer, and user. These changes would benefit anyone living in England, making the website feel a lot more personal then how it currently feels.
You ask, what is our aim? I can answer in one word: Victory. Victory at all costs—Victory in spite of all terror—Victory, however long and hard the road may be, for without victory there is no survival.
just a small extra thing I recently noticed due to a friend (i’ve just learnt to use American dates 100% of the time due to my work, but then again like 99% of English roblox players would use English date format)
These dates are all in the American date format.
For example in America that date would read 9th February 2020, but in England we would read it as the 2nd of September 2020 and the following date as 6th of august 2020.
Now i’m sure you can imagine how an English player reading that a game they are playing is created in the future would react to that. A further reason why it is essential the website is made more English-friendly.
I would hope by the point one is competent enough to develop (and here I admit i’m rather stereotypically assuming everyone who develops on roblox is at least 10 years old) that they could understand these minor language inconsistencies, I would say this change would mainly be to benefit the <10 demographic on roblox, however I still feel most English players would benefit from the change.
I would also make the safe assumption that <99% of roblox users do not use roblox studio and therefor I still feel for the most part it would be beneficial.
But yes, you are 100% correct the inconsistencies would be a problem, and may make the problem even more confusing then it currently is, however I feel that the people affected by this new problem would be significantly smaller then those effected by the current issues.
Something that has always irked me is that Roblox all-in-all does not differ between different “varieties” (for lack of a better word) of English applicable to different regions. Nearly every program I use regularly has the option to use different types of English.
The problem with implementing an option for British English, though, is that implementing British english isn’t a solution that would cover all bases. I’m from Canada, our English is more americanized than British English (“vocabulary” is closer to American English) but we still take on a lot of British spelling.
For example, we still spell realize with a Z, not an S (realise), however we spell colour with a U, which is inherited from British english; we don’t spell it as “color”. Our vocabulary is very American as well, while the “trousers” example you give isn’t inherently incorrect here, it’s just not something we say often.
There are a bunch of other examples I could bring up but I guess the consensus of this reply is to add onto your request; to add Australian and Canadian English as valid locales in addition to British (especially for in-game localization but it should be applicable to the site as well).
Nearly every game I join I see words that are applicable only in American english, especially games where arbitrary customization is possible (probably the reason the first thing I thought of was the word colour).
