Upcoming Platform-Wide Automatic Translation Experiment

Updates Announcements
#1

Hello developers!

We want to ensure that your games reach the largest audience possible without strenuous effort on your part. One of the biggest barriers to unlocking worldwide reach for your content is that players around the world may not understand your game’s default language. To remove this barrier, we have spent the last two years building and improving automatic translation capabilities in our product.

In order to ensure that our automatic translation tools are awesome, starting next week we will be running a series of tests on the platform to gather data on the impact translations have on player engagement. This means that all top games on the platform will be translated into our core languages and served to a percentage of players in those languages.

This test will take effect automatically and require no effort on your part. We just wanted to give you all a heads up in case you or your players see any translated content in your games. If at any point, you come across an undesired translation, you can always manually set a translation in your cloud localization table and our translation will be overridden. Additionally, please keep us actively informed on this thread about any bad translations you see so we can continue to improve our system!

Note: If your game has a custom localization system or you want to opt out for some other reason, please answer the following questions below about your game information and reasoning for requesting omission from the experiment and send them to @Roxybloxyy in a Forum Direct Message as soon as possible.

Game Opt-Out Questions

This is for developers who wish for their game to be omitted from the automatic translation platform experiment. We request that this form only be used by developers of games that have an extreme reason for not being a part of the experiment.

  • Link to Game (REQUIRED)
  • Developer Name (REQUIRED)
  • If game is owned by a group, then group name
  • Reasoning for requesting removal from experiment (REQUIRED)

Thank you all for being a part of our international efforts!

171 Likes
Games get translated automatically despite the Machine Translations setting being disabled
Automatic Translation: Full Platform Rollout!
Automatic Translation: Full Platform Rollout!
#2

Interesting. Now I may or may not have to create my own table for different translations for future games.

I’m curious as to how the translation would work and if any external translation service is being utilized (like Google Translate).

Let’s see how this works out! :slight_smile:

15 Likes
#4

Wow, hopefully this will be better than google translate ᕕ( ᐛ )ᕗ
Because if it isn’t good, then why have it?
I’d rather watch a show in it’s native language if the subtitles are horribly inaccurate.

28 Likes
#5

Awesome! It’s great to see Roblox pushing outwards in such a way with little to no effort on the developer’s end.

What about images? They’ll still not be translated, will they?

As long as it doesn’t OOF like Google Translate, we’re all good! :+1:

8 Likes
#6

Oh nice, I like this, it’s incredible to see how Roblox is evolving, I still remember when Roblox’s translation was something like “You mom is making food, watch eat”, yes, horrible, this is an interesting update, thanks for reading.

9 Likes
#7

I’m a bit worried about how this might negatively affect custom chat systems which rely on their own calculations for the size required for each TextLabel to fit its text accurately to be able to separate certain labels with different colors, fonts etc.

How does the automatic translation handle this matter? Will all TextLabels get translated, or can you opt-out certain TextLabels which are not intended to be translated for specific game mechanics?

11 Likes
#9

Wait…

Does this mean we won’t have to be confused by the Spanish players? It kinda bugs me, because people get mad at the Spanish players but I don’t blame them.

7 Likes
#10

FINALLY! Now I don’t need to hire a translator!

5 Likes
#11

A poor translation can be worse than no translation. How can we be sure that this won’t butcher things in the same way a service like Google Translate does?

59 Likes
#13

Thats great! Soon more people might feel a bit welcome to roblox because their language can be found in the games they want to play and not having a hard time because they might not understand english that well!

4 Likes
#14

As a translator and game developer I fear that the quality of translations will be close to google translate than to an actual translator’s job (judging from the alpha version of this update). How can we know that our player count won’t take a nose dive because of this? Will there be possible reimburshments for the possible loss of revenue? Also, will games that already were translated by Translators be overwrited?

33 Likes
#15

That’s really cool!, Is that support all languages?

5 Likes
#16

What if our games aren’t compatible with Roblox’s translation tools? I’ve seen cases of games being broken as a result of the automatic text capture system.

4 Likes
#17

Should i opt out? I am not sure if this would mess up my game.

My game has tons of weird names which can’t get auto-translated i think.


What would this do to my game exactly?
3 Likes
#18

Will this experiment respect the ‘Configure Localization’ options that developers set on their games?

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When developers specify ‘Automatic Translation’ to be disabled, strings in the cloud table that have not been translated before should not be automatically translated.

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These options being set to false (which happens to be the default value) shouldn’t ever result in the game using automated translations.

And for my last question, I’m assuming automated translations will only be displayed for Gui’s that have their GuiBase2d.AutoLocalize property set to true (which is the default). If I have explicitly set this property to false, will this experiment respect the developer’s choice?

23 Likes
#19

Would the automatic translation also apply to the chat? That would drastically improve the ability for players who speak different languages to be able to play together and have fun. @asimo3089 actually suggested this on Twitter earlier, which caused me to ask.

19 Likes
#20

Great to see this! What happens if our games are translated in all languages currently? Will you overight the existing tables for the test? Totally down to see that happen - Spanish is my only professionally translated language.

Also - will this translate the name, description, badge names, etc automatically as well or just in game?

4 Likes
#21

Very interesting. This feel’s like the future, but it’s just a experiment. Will be awesome to see how it turns out!
Hopefully it has all the language’s too.

4 Likes
#22

I don’t think that would be either practical or doable. It would either get the font wrong (some fonts don’t support non-Latin characters) or it would just look like squares for several languages. It also would be very difficult to get and match every single possible font someone could use in an image, especially with the addition of drop shadows, effects on the text, etc.

10 Likes
#23

This sounds like an excellent update, but how will translators fare to this?

6 Likes