I don't know how much programming $ MWM has for attracting the non-english speaking markets.. but something as simple as a text translator put into your chat module would go a long way.
Google is looking for beta participants for some of their translation modules that cost nothing, but there are also server side translators that you can use in the "options menu" of the game.
Je pensais à venir en France au cours des deux prochaines années and I'd love to have the ability to invite my new friends to enjoy my virtual life as a superhero.
(Not to mention the implication on the Asian markets that somehow tend to dominate MMORPGs)
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Crowd Control Enthusiast
Je pense que c'est une bonne idée, but I should point out that Asian markets aren't so big on western MMOs in the vein of CoH (Hence why City Of Hero, the Korean spinoff never made it to market). They seem to like the grindfests more.
If some third-party outfit like Google could provide a no-cost client-side capability to translate chat window text to a language of your choice (within reason of course) then I think it might be worthwhile for MWM to look into supporting it.
But if this feature would be in any way difficult to implement then it could easily be put off until after launch because I suspect it would not be considered a high priority item - at best this would be a "nice-to-have" QoL improvement. Remember that people managed to play CoH on its NA servers for several years without any non-English language support so I can't see this as ranking as a "must have" capability for CoT on Day One.
CoH player from April 25, 2004 to November 30, 2012
[IMG=400x225]https://i.imgur.com/NHUthWM.jpeg[/IMG]
If i remember correctly, FF14 does this via "quick chat commands" or something similar, where it is just certain phrases that get translated across.
But there is also the case of privacy where people might not want information to be sent to another company for translation (and remember, it could be *EVERY* single line of chat text in the game that does this... )
If it is *ALL* done on the MWM servers and there are no up loading of the chat logs to other companies I have no problems. This would make me feel safer telling people ingame my OOC contact details (skype contact, ts/vent server settings etc). You know, stuff that might not want a 3rd party to hear necessarily (and yes, I know that MWM will be keeping logs, but I don't expect them to give them to Microsoft/Google freely)
Yeah there's the point that our chat text might be sent to a third-party server for translation. I would be less inclined to accept that type of solution for this due to not only privacy concerns but the added latency involved.
As I implied if MWM could employ some kind of "client-side" tool/module (where the translations would take place locally on our computers instead of being parsed out to the Internet first) then this might be viable. But as you say an outfit like Google would probably love to have this kind of thing pass through their own servers (for their own "data mining" purposes) so care would have to be taken by MWM to make sure it's done in a safe way.
CoH player from April 25, 2004 to November 30, 2012
[IMG=400x225]https://i.imgur.com/NHUthWM.jpeg[/IMG]
Why do you want a translator ? :)
They just have to create officials in game channels for each language. It prevent them from having servers for each country and allow people to play (or stay or just talk) in their own langage. And, if it's an official option, it can be turn on for many langage.
Just imagine... no don't imagine, it's real ^^ I'm French, but i want to play with French people. At launch, my game ask me my country. I choose FR. Then, in game, i have all the FR messages from the zone in my channel and, if i want to, i can choose to add US and/or GER and/or SPA, etc etc and then have all the GER and/or SPA and FR in my channel
I'm not sure to express myself in a good way xD But, it seems to be descriptive enought ^^
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I would like to play with as many players as I can comfortably. If I move to France and can only play with my French and francophone friends I'll be sad.
Also a universal translator (even a crude one) is easier to implement than creating several different manually translated versions of the game.
Crowd Control Enthusiast
Having separate chat channels for different languages may be fine in and of itself.
But what happens if let's say a player who's a native German speaker wants to play this game? Wouldn't it be fairly useful if his/her client could translate EVERY chat message he/she sees into German so they can read any channel they wanted? That's what we're talking about here. The same would work in reverse - let's say you're a native English speaker who doesn't know any German. Wouldn't it be cool if your client could translate the German player's chat into English for you?
So sure they could have dedicated language channels (for people who wanted to see native languages written exactly as typed). But ultimately I think it'd be pretty cool if I could type in any language and have anyone else understand me regardless of what languages they read/write.
CoH player from April 25, 2004 to November 30, 2012
[IMG=400x225]https://i.imgur.com/NHUthWM.jpeg[/IMG]
As an English guy who played CoH in some French speaking groups (I didn't talk that much but understood most of what was being said) a non games specific translator would struggle with the abbreviated version of French used by gamers. Having witnessed some of the atrocities of Google translate in other areas of interest of mine (from Hungarian folk metal lyrics and other associated web pages to foreign bridge websites), I wouldn't trust it not to get me horribly banned :)
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Not to mention as well that the other players are as prone to making typos that can *totally* change the meaning of something when translated, or just fail to translate something.
Also, this brings up an interesting case: How would the translator be able to tell the difference between a players name (if it is in a foreign language) or the person just using the word/phrase/name properly in conversation (ie a character called "Petit Mort" and someone just using that phrase ie "c'est un petit mort, Petit mort". excuse my french, but this was without a translator but it should be "it is only a little death, Petit mort" (with the 2nd Petit Mort being the player name).
See the problem?
This will happen, especially when you have to consider the fact that people (especially in this genre of games) will be using names like that.. and also quite possibly using phrases like that....
Once the translator can cope with that situation, without the player having to use tags to designate various "do not translate this" tags, then I will accept it.
I feel i should clarify.. I am not asking for "passive" translating of everything written.. more like a tiny icon next to each chat that comes in that you can click that will translate for you.
Passive translating takes too much server time. But a quick click attached to a free API.. pourquoi pas
Crowd Control Enthusiast
It could be a useful tool and it likely won't be a mystery when someone is using it. In such cases I'd expect people to pay a bit more attention to their typing and to stop using common shorthand / abbreviations. Someone who cannot show that much courtesy likely doesn't want anyone on their team who needs to use a translation tool. 'course that still leaves colloquialisms and, as Minotaur pointed out, the fact that any dictionary or translation program should be taken with a grain of salt.
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Yeah I'm aware that "translator technology" in this context would currently be far from perfect and may almost be more trouble than it's worth. Still the core idea is interesting and I suspect as years go by the solutions for this will only get better until it's so quick and robust that'll it practically become a default feature of any MMO.
Having a way to manually control when something gets translated is probably a good way to save server processing time for those situations when you only need to see one or two lines worth of chat translated.
But assuming a translation system like this ever happens there probably ought to be an option to "auto translate" every line of chat from a specific chat channel because it might get a little tedious having to click a manual translate button if you need to translate more than just one or two lines. I'd expect that the manual mode of translation would be the default mode and setting a channel to "auto translate" would have to deliberately chosen because you'd have to specifically be willing to accept the possible lag/delays that might happen with constant translations.
CoH player from April 25, 2004 to November 30, 2012
[IMG=400x225]https://i.imgur.com/NHUthWM.jpeg[/IMG]
I doubt it would be robust though... there will always be problems, especially in a genre where "play on words" for names/locations etc abound everywhere. Hell, I read an article a while back (PC Gamer I believe) where they interviewed someone who worked as a translator. And as to how bad it could be, even when using *native fluent* speakers of the language. You might not even always be able to use the correct word until you have the whole *paragraph* present to present context. Just going sentence by sentence can result in cases can result in the word being translated in 2 different ways.
I will have to find the article for this, because it is interesting to read... and it highlighted some of the problems where just translating line by line is NOT always going to be the best route. You need context. Doing it line by line might be easier, but it can also produce incorrect meanings.
IF that problem ever gets resolved, where it can pick up on the nuances of being able to translate "petit mort, Petit Mort" properly to "small death, Petit Mort" and deal with phrases/names that are play on words... then I might believe it. But I seriously doubt it.
Again I agree chat translation "perfection" may never be achievable, especially in a MMO setting where there are cases of unique abbreviations and shorthands which wouldn't be part of any standard language.
Still I believe it's possible there will come a time (maybe some years from now) when something like this will have a success rate of say 70-80% and be as commonplace as in-line spellcheckers that focus on single words are today. That may actually be "good enough" for MMOs because after all they're just games, not international diplomacy sessions where precise translation would be critical. Even without proper in-line grammar translation being able to "take stabs" at single words might be more helpful than absolutely nothing in this setting.
CoH player from April 25, 2004 to November 30, 2012
[IMG=400x225]https://i.imgur.com/NHUthWM.jpeg[/IMG]
When Global Chat was introduced to the EU, it had the humorous name of "Total Cat"....
Because some had actually *translated* "Global Chat" to "chat global". Which is the correct French Translation.
However, when translated BACK into English, it became "Total Cat" which is also correct (although overall Cat is also possible, all depends on the context of what you are talking about.
The thing is, these are NOT uncommon words to translate...
Complete Cat protects the night!
So, what is needed is the ability to Copy/Paste from Chat to a translator and then Copy/Paste back into Chat? Because, then the transliterator-thingy doesn't need to be part of the software? Or, then again, perhaps there could be a plug-in that translated highlighted text? Then it would be running on the player's computer and wouldn't affect the server.
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Fireheart
Have done a little pruning, there's no need for the personal stuff (also deleted one post that made no sense once the previous one was removed).
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Works for me, sir.
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Fireheart
It will not be possible to have a live translator i think. For all the reasons mentionned previously (semantic field, lexical field, turn of phrases, idiomatic expressions, etc)
BUT, maybe people can have just a glimpse of what it is said bye players, with the mains words of their sentences ?
(I could be really fun to see a speech bubbles with one picture for one main word like a rebus xD but it's not possible as well.)
I'm just trying to think about a realistic compromise...
Just to make it clear, why are we talking about a global chat which can translate in some common langages if the game will be localized ?
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Even if the game text is "localized" that's not really going to help when players who are native speakers in different languages are trying to talk to each other in chat.
CoH player from April 25, 2004 to November 30, 2012
[IMG=400x225]https://i.imgur.com/NHUthWM.jpeg[/IMG]
Truth. I live in San Francisco where at any given moment I can hear a conversation in Spanish, French, Cantonese or English.
Crowd Control Enthusiast
Don't know why i had in mind that people will not be on the same servers... You are right, it will not help.
We could create an international language ? xD
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Well obviously English is currently one of the most widely used [url=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_lingua_francas#English]lingua francas[/url] of the Internet. And until "in-line translators" become viable (assuming they ever do) I suspect that's going to be the main language we'll see in CoT regardless.
CoH player from April 25, 2004 to November 30, 2012
[IMG=400x225]https://i.imgur.com/NHUthWM.jpeg[/IMG]
With the mega-server setup, there is sure to be a cacophony of literacies, from clear English, to lazy English, to garbled Internet, and any number of other Languages. I do think that some form of translator would be useful, but it needs to be able to work on a target phrase, on the fly, and not be running on the game-server. I could certainly envision opening a chat-tab that keeps a running translation of input from various channels. However, I see it as a Supplement and not a substitution for those critical information-flows.
Be Well!
Fireheart
One element that'll certainly help is if missions and items can easily be linked in chat and will automatically display in the client language. That'll at least allow for people to hook up for missions and to trade, even if communication in general is difficult or impossible.
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That is quite doable. Easier if the content was already translated into the language you want as well (ie French/German for example).
The way in which this would happen is that you link the mission via an ID ( something like [MID:1235486] or some such), so that when the *client* then displays this, it would instead show "Go. Hunt. Kill Skuls" in English/French/German (or whatever your client was set to).
The same can be done with item IDS as well.
I like the option for 3rd party developers to handle this outside the game. Some TTS (text to speech) systems grab text from the Clipboard and use it to speak the text. If CoT had an option to Wrap the Chat in a XML format before sending it to the Clipboard, 3rd party developers could use that in a number of ways.. TTS, Translation, etc... :)