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

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.

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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.

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