they actually would screw up all texts, because bots can’t guess the context of the strings in a game and they can directly translate something REALLY different
If you care about your audience and want to offer the best experience to them, then I don’t recommend using this feature.
You would disable it on text labels which represent the username or any item name. You can also do something many would frown upon and translate everything to the left and to the right of the object in question, or you could use a placeholder word which cannot be translated, something like a string composed of UTF-8 symbol characters and replace it with the word later on.
I’m not too confident about this all. Yes it’s a good thing that you give people the option that e.g. can’t afford translators but the downside to it is the quality of it. If this were to be translated with an AI it would most likely contain a lot of flaws (unless Roblox has miraculously developed an AI that does translations better than google grammar and vocabulary wise).
Just forcing it upon games doesn’t seem like the best approach.
On top of that, if this system is truly better than e.g. Google translate and a lot would be humanly translated, What would happen to all the current and upcomming translators? You’d basically be nullifying people’s ability to work on Roblox as a translator which of a lot have put a ton of effort in it to reach where they are at now.
There’s still a ton of lacking information on how it’s implemented and how it’s used. This really needs clarification as that might be critical to some of us.
Ooh, this is actually quite interesting. I’m a bit curious though, how will the automatic translation work? I mean, it is automatic translation and wouldn’t that mean there will also be some mistranslations as well? Also, it would be cool to show maybe like an icon if the player is a foreigner or something. I don’t know lol
Welp, time to switch my language to english. Automatic translations have always been pretty bad for me, not gonna lie
I am very interested on how this will turn out. There are many potential problems as others have stated with this. However, it would be very useful for small developers if it were to work well! It would make more sense to have games sign up to test instead of assuming everyone is okay with letting this happen. For a lot of games, this could ruin the experience and result in loss of revenue. This is just my opinion and I know others might have different views on the matter.
An automatic translator can’t check a game for context, which will lead to an enormous amount of incorrectly interpreted text and will just confuse the players more. I understand that it’s an experiment, but opting-in developers without their consent is honestly one of the worst decisions coming from Roblox, in my opinion. I’m not mentioning the fact that localizing means not to translate, but to adapt the game.
This is… an interesting update to say the least, and I have a few questions/statements regarding it.
First, if I understand it correctly, I think this is, in general, a good update for small game developers who don’t have the budget to get translations done professionally, which is understandable and I think that helps get smaller games to a somewhat larger audience (so long as the translations are high quality enough where enough players can understand them). That being said, I think that’s really the only use case where this would be optimal. Maybe I’m wrong but I’m doubting that this could be a replacement for professional translation, and I believe that professional translation should continue to be used by anyone who has the budget to do so.
My question is if this will override my game’s translations or if I can continue getting translations professionally done whilst this update automatically runs.
This sounds incredibly interesting! Let’s just hope we don’t see any horrible mistranslations, though.
While trying to reach out to players of all countries is great and I appreciate your efforts, there are issues with having automatic translations.
First of all, having a bot translate the stuff is not a good idea. There are many issues with automatic translations, as they often don’t make sense.
Second, languages can have more complex grammar than English has. Let’s say a game is called “Mine and Craft”. Google Translate ignores cases and other grammar stuff that is not present in English, so in Czech that would end up with “Těžit a vyrábět”, which would, translated back to English, be “To mine and to craft”, which makes no sense.
Third, according to the first 2 issues, it would make sense to auto-translation be a opt-in feature instead of a opt-out one. I think that at least 50% of the developers would want to opt out as it can mess up the game titles/descriptions quite a bit.
So, I really hope that this becomes an opt-in instead of opt-out as translations made by an algorithm and not by a human with actual knowledge of grammar and stuff can make no sense at all.
Like community translation, it’s better than nothing for languages which aren’t ‘primary’ attentions. (E.g. more ‘minor’ languages in your games stats)
you got a point, and i can agree that It would actually be good for small development teams that cannot afford localization
But think about other devs who will overuse this feature thinking it is accurate enough, sure it’s better than nothing, but you’re trying to offer the best experience for players worldwide, if you care about the people who play your game, just don’t use this update unless you just need it as a temporary placeholder
I can imagine that there are a fair amount of people who can understand English but would prefer to play games in their native language if translations are available. Automatic fallback to machine translation could lead to a negative user experience where such a player would have a better experience reading English, but is stuck with a grammatically incoherent mess in their native language.
I don’t think that automatic machine translation would be better than nothing in a situation like this. This could of course be resolved if Roblox prompted (don’t assume!) users to select if they want fallback machine translation or not.
I think that it’s a bit bold to assume that just because a user has their native language selected, that that means they also want machine translation.
Will you make it so we know that they do speak in a different language in some way so we know they are not nativaly English. I was thinking about the language flag being next to the username.
That’s a separate request — and can be implemented by a developer by forking the LuaChat module and using LocalizationService APIs.
Interesting update, let’s hope it’ll bring in a more diverse player base to other games that may not be able to get there game properly translated.
Can we have more information on how this will work on a technical level? It’s very alarming not knowing how this could potentially interfere with existing systems, or how it will integrate.
Roblox has been working on this update for quite a while and the translations are a-okay. From being in the Beta of this feature, I can tell you no translations will be over-written and it has overall boosted my game a little bit by having machine translations on. Also, Polish isn’t on the list of automatic translations so I don’t think you have to worry about your translation service losing customers.
Overall, most developers will probably opt to have manual translations on their games for a better experience, this will probably only benefit smaller developers once the feature is fully released and not in beta.
Now I know that some of my games have a pretty big international audience, so I’m wondering… would this be done with google translate? Or Artificial Intelligence based off of actual fluent speakers. Most of you guys know… google translate isn’t always the most accurate platform.
I translate a few games that took part in it and the translators of the languages they worked on repeatedly told me that it was terrible.