Translation Updates: Roblox Translate, Thai & Turkish, and more!

A game with little to no players isn’t really useful for Roblox to test features. By selecting the most active games this means they can better analyze retention rates and such, as they have done.

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Could someone please explain to me what all the trouble with manual translators seems to be? (Preferably in DM’s please). I see why people don’t like the idea of automatic translation (e.g. context requirements, translation errors, and it may get to a point where it replaces manual translators themselves), however this tool isn’t only for the top performing games, it’s for everyone. Some developers barely have enough money to pay their own team, let alone get a manual translator. It’s a good step for beginners and learners, but once you get into the higher stages of developing then it will get used less and less.

Automatic translation isn’t perfect, and it won’t be a for a very long time, however the fact that people seem to think that manual translators are being ruled out here seems wrong (this is just my opinion). Manual translators can still be used, and they definitely still are, but this seems like another option for other people who don’t need them or don’t want them.

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Hi somehow my game is in this Auto Translate programme and As a person who know other language other than english, Its pretty good at doing it’s job, However, It seemed that is is capturing non game string, And translation don’t appear in-game.Also not that inappropriate results appear

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This is why I would recommend having larger fragments of text be manually translated; the translation engine can most likely handle a single word. Any mistakes can also be easily fixed if you or someone else speaks the language.

And for complex languages like Turkish, you’re better off having it be manually translated. It’s too much of a hassle to deal with the machine translation.

I could also see it directly translating things without taking context into account. For example, ‘hot dog’ (as in the food) could be misinterpreted as ‘sıcak köpek’, which quite literally means ‘a hot dog’.

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one minor gripe: Alpha/Beta should be treated as a game version rather than a generic name in translation. e.g Mortem Metallum [Alpha]

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Somehow the Auto translation mixed up Turkish and Chinese and ended up with something that absolutely made no sense

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HI there! Can you share a larger screenshot that shows me the languages that you have on the left side? For example, one like this:

Also, can you share a link to your experience? Feel free to DM this info to me too!

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Hi everyone!

Just wanted to update that we have started enabling automatic translation for the rest of the top 50k experiences. As always, you can opt out of automatic translations at any time. If you’d like to remove all translations that were added via automatic translation, you can follow the instructions here.

Please continue to share your feedback with us in this thread or via DM :slight_smile:

Best,
Caelestene.

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Hello @Caelestene I hope I’m not to late to this discussion. I just have a few questions as a translator.

  1. For the translations that are wrong Is there a way to manually change them.

  2. How do you get your translations. Like from native speakers, Online Translator how?

  3. How often do you update this system (small bug fixes included). Also apart from the link in the description is there any other ways to access information on this topic?

Thank You So much for reading up on this. I Have been a translator for a few years now and I took a break and coming back into this with this information really beinfs me great hope for the future.

Have a Blessed Day

You change them in the translator portal for the game.

I believe that they get a 3rd party service to feed their localization tools with some Dev Rel members from other countries there to help correct things as needed.

They update it all the time. As for info on it, Roblox’s Guide to Localization is a good resource to go through.

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Thank You final question I forgot to add that I thought about was let’s say you have a wrong translation. like ciao is hello but you made it annoying. Idk. When you update it and fix the errors will I have to reput in a string with new code or will it automatically sync to the right translation. Does that make sense?

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Currently, if our automatic translations are improved and updated, we do not update your existing translations. You will have to re-add a string to get the improvements.

Later this year, we are planning to make update the translations automatically. We will not overwrite any manual edits you’ve made for translations, however.

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Ok Great Thanks for all the help. Cant wait to see this turn out.

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Hi everyone, just wanted to share that anyone can now enable auto translation for their experiences, no matter what rank your experience is!

@Arc_1996 @mrkbx fyi, since I saw your comments asking for when more devs can access this feature (not just top devs).

Additionally, we also enabled auto translation by default for the top 100k experiences. :slight_smile: And as usual, you can always disable auto translation in your settings.

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Whooo! Finally! waiting months for this.

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What is the rationale behind enabling auto translations for top 100k games? I’m just curious since not many developers really care for localization and for a lot of experiences it has proven to be very inaccurate even as of recently.

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We’d like to enable auto translation for as many experiences as possible, as we have found that localizing experiences results in a better experience for our players! :slight_smile: I’d love to get to a world where every experience on Roblox is localized by default, but we’re still working towards that lofty goal.

In terms of inaccuracies, auto translation is not perfect, but we are constantly working on improving our models. And we’re still working on forming a Translator Community on the Devforum where translators can help improve Roblox Translate too. Thanks for your question, Koiske. Hoping to continue working with you and the other translators!

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I don’t think you can translate Turkish well.

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Roblox’s machine translation translated them as different words, even though they’re both exactly the same string. In fact, the translated Turkish string on the left is not even Turkish. There is no such word in Turkish lol.

image

image

Here, it took the string of Villains as Villages. So the meaning of the line translated into Turkish was: “Villages / Heroes were killed
There are many more examples like these…

Most developers who know about machine translations of Roblox prefer experienced and native community translators already working on Roblox. If you can’t understand any roblox experience even in your native language, make sure that the game has been automatically translated. For this reason alone, the number of people changing the Roblox language from Turkish to English is quite high - myself included -

Many factors contribute to the difficulty of machine translation, including words with multiple meanings, sentences with multiple grammatical structures, uncertainty about what a pronoun refers to, and other problems of grammar.

A translator is supposed to be fluent in both the source and target languages
Machine translation systems today are - at best - to systems to help people get a general idea of what something means in a foreign language. But certainly not to be trusted for real translation.
Basically a professional translator goes much faster translating from the original than they would correcting the messy output of a machine translation system.

@Caelestene there is bug in latest translation update. Here is my professional writeup:

Summary

After an update to an experience’s description, a nonfunctional link appears offering to “Translate to Original Language”

Steps to Reproduce

  1. Update the description of the game (game description is in English, updated text is in English)
  2. Visit the game
  3. Notice the part of the description that you updated, is invisible.
  4. Notice the bottom has a link for “Translate to Original Language”
  5. Click the link
  6. Notice the updated text now appears
  7. Notice the bottom link has changed to “Translate to English”

Observed Behavior

An incorrect prompt appears for “Translate to Original Language” when nothing needs to be translated. An incorrect prompt appears for “Translate to English” after that. The updated description text is not visible until pressing the incorrect Translate link.

Expected Behavior

Expect that updates to an English description, in English, should not trigger a link to Translate when that is not necessary or desired. Expect that updates to the description should be reflected in the game’s description immediately without needing to click a link for translation.

Here is the experience in question:

Here’s what it looks like after I added one line to the bottom of the description:

And here is what it turns into after I click the link for “Translate to Original Language”


You can see in this 2nd screen shot, the text I added to the description that triggered this mess, which was:
“This is one of my favorite games I’ve ever played!” – ILOVEEVEE75

/cc #Bug-Support @Focia19

UPDATE: after a period of time, this behavior disappeared. Although it was short-lived, it should still be considered a bug, since the website is not working as expected when the description is updated.