This is an important issue. From my personal experience working as a Brazilian Portuguese translator in the past and having experienced automatically translated games, the quality of these automated translations often turned out to be distractingly horrible, to the point of me rather wanting to use the default English strings but having no other way to do so other than leaving the game, changing the website language and then rejoining, which is a huge pain.
Automated translations also risk missing important context in many situations which can degrade the experience even more. I understand this is being done with good intentions but I fear the result will be ultimately harmful if we can not be assured of a high-quality automated translation (which is difficult to achieve either way, I guess). Often times, bad translation is worse than no translation.
This is not apparent to native English speakers at all but it can have a big impact on everyone else in the world.
Please consider making this experiment opt-in instead of opt-out.
And developers: please consider paying an experienced translator to localize your game for a foreign audience. Google Translating all your strings often times passes the impression of a poorly made game.
No automated system is a replacement for translators, since automatic systems almost always struggle with context-based translation. A lot of our words in English (and other languages, too, but especially English) that have double-meanings would make an automatic system struggle, especially with games where buttons are usually just single words rather than full sentences where context could be used.
So of course I am extremely happy to see that Roblox has taken steps to make it easier for players to communicate on a global level no matter where they are from. Though this feature comes with a big challenge.
How will Roblox make sure that they are actively updating translation errors caught by users? Since if I am correct even Google them selves have many errors constantly.
Specific words do not translate will to other languages, and sometimes words in a certain language dont exist in other languages. Which is why manual translators for a while now have been in demand to translate games as they are able to determine proper synonymous or replacement words.
I feel as if this experiment has a couple of big problems that need to be overcome or at least communicated to developers better. It is good that Roblox has taken this step but as we have seen automatic translation still has its own set of problems that I am not sure have been solved yet.
Very valid point, but the need for translators would drastically decrease - which could impact some of these users. Personally this update would stop me from hiring a translator for my game as an example.
I could see this being viable if the translation list can be paired with strings in a table api for developers to access so that if there is a faulty translation they could manually fix it for that part. this would prevent the need to opt-out
Iām surprised an easier way to switch back to English hasnāt been developed yet. Possibly worth a feature request for a simple option in the game menu to switch between translated languages, perhaps with a drop-down of supported languages.
That would also be useful if, for example a specific language has not been included, but one similar enough for you to get by is available, such as some closely related Latin languages.
Does this automatically run the translation through the default Roblox filter? Iām certain weāve all seen amusing images where auto-translations take innocent phrases and make them less appropriate.
The filter already causes problems with English, on which it has tons of training. Iād bet that it fails on less common languages even more.
If this auto-translates and then filters, I worry that a lot of games are just going to turn into a lot of #### and ruin player experience when the Shop GUI is unreadable.
Also, what if TextScaled is false, and the developer sets the size using TextService. The translated text would no longer fit, turning the gameās UI into a cluttered mess.
I think this would be a really great update for everyone, butā¦
What will happen if my game already have a translation to other language. Are those Robux spent for nothing? Will there be an option to disactivate this setting in my game? I need an answer please.
It will probably be a basic level of translation. Google Translate and many other AI based services donāt have much regulation, and might turn something like āI like breadā into unintentional ODing, so those are definitely out of question.
Also, it will probably only be activated when manual translations donāt exist, or when itās something in the chat.
I know automatic translations can never beat a human translation, but this is too cool. It takes a lot of work to translate, and having at least some of it lifted off our shoulders automatically is great.
Are translations able to be applied to text on runtime? Most developers will use textlabels/buttons/boxes that will change the text, even to the point where it updates almost every second or less.
As @Intended_Pun said, disabling the AutoLocalize property will avoid that issue. That property should only be enabled if there are no complex words, which include names. Itās not hard to code a module that can automatically apply proper translations, ignoring those words.