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Kamikazifly

In-Game Chat Translator.

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I have talked with players from other countries using Translate.Google.com, which helped them and I become friends. Often the other person is lonely cause they can not understand English, but would like to share their experience with anyone they can relate to. When there is a language barrier, anyone who can speak their language is someone they can relate to. Translate.Google.com has an automatic language detection system, which makes it easier for me to decide what language to reply in.

My suggestion is to detect non-English characters and automatically translate the entire line into English in /kchat and /kshout. If this works well, then perhaps enabling a setting in their console to translate text back into their language (which they have to select). This would allow non-English speaking people to easily intermix with any other language, enabling them to enjoy our community. (Czech & Russian are easy examples.)

This would bring in a new customer base and make gaming history. Blowing all other games off the globe, while making huge waves in the gaming industry. Google often seems to want to help the little guy and push into new frontiers where ever they can, just for the greater good of mankind.

Edited by Kamikazifly

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If you are fluent in 2 languages and try to use google translate to translate between both these languages you will find out that the translation is hilarious at best, and the original meaning is in many cases lost if the sentence contains more than 2 words.

Anyway, is it really that simple to code in the google translate function into all chats in Wurm? I doubt it.

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As Czech speaking English (I hope it is English :rolleyes: ) I can confirm, that any longer sentence translated though Translate.Google.com is somehow, ehm, strange, often missing negative, most every time with strange conjugation.

I used it to confirm or find better words combination, but it is worse than useless to translate without knoledge of english :wacko:

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Getting accurate translations with GT is easy... It is just a case of phrasing the sentance correctly so the context is not lost :)

English -> French

"I would like a car"

translates as "Je voudrais une voiture."

French -> English

"i want a car"

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It shouldn't be that difficult to implement. Afaik there is a Google java api that can be used from the client to send chat lines through google translate. It being client only wouldn't affect anyone else either.

The translation isn't that good, but it works nearly flawlessly if you use the most basic grammar of your language and the most common meaning of a word.

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This would be a pretty decent addition to the game I think, especially seeing as a large number of wurmians already seem to be using Google translate. Maybe it should come with a warning though "The original point of this message may be completely lost if used!" :P

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I'm not against the suggestion but I wonder how someone, who doesn't speak the most basic English, can even as much as play wurm? Do they really go and translate every word, eventlog sentence, -everything- though google translate? WHen I started playing my English really wasn't that great but I was able to make porper sentences with halfdecent grammar, enough for me to able to conversate with others... I don't think I would've made it very far in a complex game with no native wiki for me otherwise :P

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I don't think this would be difficult at all, all you have to do is send data to translate.google.com and then read it back. The problem is the server power that would use up... (although it could of course just be client-based, duh!) I can see how it would benefit Wurm and it would certainly be groundbreaking. Google Translate doesnt give a great translation although It's definately better than nothing.

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The big problem is with slang expressions. Something like Google Translate will only do a word by word translation, losing the original meaning. Sometimes the translation of such words or phrases can have hilarious results, sometimes it can come back as almost insulting. For example the phrase 'pop a cap' means to shoot someone, but it could come back as 'father a hat'. We're still a long way from having any proper Universal Translator.

Edited by Vroomfondel

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hmm, I'm not sure about the cost. It doesn't seem that high.

Google takes 20$ for 1M chars, (for example the last two Harry Potter books were about that size, each.)

on the other hand there could be a lot chat needing to be translated.

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I'm not against the suggestion but I wonder how someone, who doesn't speak the most basic English, can even as much as play wurm?

^^^^^This. If your english is not good enough for basic communication, how are you supposed to play this game which is completely in english and uses quite alot of uncommon words. Don't get me wrong, it's basically a good idea, i just don't see the need for it, and tbh i would feel development time being wasted with this (and possibly development money).

In my area there are americans, brits, dutch people (and probably several other nations) and i'm german, still we have no communication problems at all.

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My Freedom chat log on Indy from August has 300k characters. My playtime increased by about 4days 5hours. This is about a sixth of a whole month. That's about 1.8M characters per month. Lets play safe and say 1M characters. Then there's the other servers, the GL chat. CA chat. And the server would have to have it translated to various languages.

If it's implemented client side it will scale with the number of players logged in. And if I go by my play style a lot of never read chat log will be translate and waste money. Translating my chat logs would have cost about 20$. How is this affordable if a character only nets 5EUR per month?

It's probably easier if the player copies text he does not understand and pastes it into the translator website. That's free and only those parts are translated where a translation is really wanted.

Edited by ago
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...

It's probably easier if the player copies text he does not understand and pastes it into the translator website. That's free and only those parts are translated where a translation is really wanted.

I could see this added to the client, as in right-click on a text line and select "Open Google translate in a browser and send it this line."

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I wouldn't like text to be automatically translated, even in kchat or gl.

At least not without some prefix that allows you to see, that it is translated text, to avoid bad translations being misinterpreted.

The google translator is actually pretty good for some languages and bad for others.

My mother tongue is German, my English is not the worst and I know somewhat Japanese.

English->German and German->English often gives good results. You can see the translator actually knows the grammar and word ordner and adjusts them for the new language.

English->Japanese and Japanese->English however, almost always gives weird results.

While the word-for-word translation is obviously correct, the word ordner and grammar often isn't.

On the other hand, you wouldn't have much of a problem with slang there, because most of the meaning would be contained in Kanji(originally chinese characters, the japanese has more characters which represent syllables), which can be translated.

So it isn't such a bad idea, but the problem lies within the languages that are hard to translate.

I like the idea of Seara. You write your text in the chat line and are able to translate it yourself from inside the game.

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That's because English and German have close roots and are heavily intermixed.

We use similar Grammar and have similar ways of expressing things.

Japanese has a different root, it can't be translated by words, you have to grab the meaning and reformulate the sentence in another language, something that is incredible difficult for program logic.

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^^^^^This. If your english is not good enough for basic communication, how are you supposed to play this game which is completely in english and uses quite alot of uncommon words. Don't get me wrong, it's basically a good idea, i just don't see the need for it, and tbh i would feel development time being wasted with this (and possibly development money).

In my area there are americans, brits, dutch people (and probably several other nations) and i'm german, still we have no communication problems at all.

Most of my friends in Brazil didn't know english or japanese as kids/teens, but we grew playing games in japanese and english, even not understand anything, from normal fighting games to RPG. I know a few players of complicated games like EVE who doesn't understand english neither.

Even agreeing it's not really worth doing a whole translator system, I would LOVE to see more channels for non-english speakers. They can't speak in CA nor kingdom, so the only thing left is Village, PM and Alliance. Not even sure if they can speak in Local. Why not just add some optional channels in different languages?

If the Staff doesn't want non-english speakers, than that's fine by me, it's within their power to decide. But that's something I don't know.

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As a German speaking player of Wurm Online. I only can say if you use google translator for sentences it is just random gliberish which comes out.

Translators are good for small word groups or words only but not for sentences and also not as an ingame translators.

Edited by Sklo:D
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Most of my friends in Brazil didn't know english or japanese as kids/teens, but we grew playing games in japanese and english, even not understand anything, from normal fighting games to RPG. I know a few players of complicated games like EVE who doesn't understand english neither.

You know that Eve has a full russian translation ....

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You know that Eve has a full russian translation ....

But it doesn't have a portuguese one. So most people in Brazil still wouldn't understand it.

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Most people on Brasil don't even speak (brazilian) portuguese correctly...

Edited by LuisMH

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Most people on Brasil doesn't even speak (brazilian) portuguese correctly...

The point is not if they can speak portuguese correctly or not, but what to do if they can't speak english.

Also, even if it's rare, there are some people who have a crude understanding of english, so they can read something, but they've no idea how to speak/write on their own.

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There is nothing the dev's can or have to do about them...

Just like you and me (i'm brazilian) and whoever else, they need to LEARN ENGLISH. That's all...

Time, patience, google translator and hopefully another player to help them (I was helping a spanish player, since i could understand most of what he said since spanish/portuguese are kinda alike)...

I can't see any other solution.

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There is nothing the dev's can or have to do about them...

Just like you and me (i'm brazilian) and whoever else, they need to LEARN ENGLISH. That's all...

Time, patience, google translator and hopefully another player to help them (I was helping a spanish player, since i could understand most of what he said since spanish/portuguese are kinda alike)...

I can't see any other solution.

I can agree on the in-chat translation, but creating a few language channels isn't difficult, I'm sure of it.

If there could exist a channel where you can speak with a language you're familiar with, someone could get their help pretty easily. But as people can't speak another language in kingdom and CA (which is mostly all channels someone has unless they join a settlement), what can the player looking for help do?

Learn english? Sure, they'll learn english just to play a game.

This is a place for suggestion, and this is mine. If the Devs don't want to bother creating a few channels to help other people, it's fine for me as I can understand english. But a lot of potential players won't be playing.

How many brazilians do you know who plays Wurm? You're the first one I happen to find. How many brazilians would join this game if there was but a small help in their own native language? I can point to a few dozens myself.

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