How possible would it be for Blizzard to auto translate chat?

Community General Discussion
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So one problem I’m running into in my LFG groups is people speaking other languages, making it hard to communicate. I was in a group with someone who spoke Spanish, and I do not. He was a feral druid but he’d be standing there casting Wrath and other balance abilities and not going into cat form most of the time. I wanted to communicate to him that he needs to either swap specs into balance or use cat form, but he couldn’t understand what I was saying.

So I resorted to google translate and copied and pasted into chat and he seemed to get it, but that made me wonder… can’t Blizzard add this functionality to the game? Surely there’s a way to auto translate chat? You’d set your language in the settings and the game would attempt to auto translate users who chat in a different language, that they also chose in the settings. And chat translated would be designated with a tag, like [Translated] or something before the actual message, so you know it’s not gonna be perfect but an approximation of what the person is trying to say.

Can’t we do this? I think it would help bring people of different languages together to be able to play without a lot of issues.

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I know it can be done, but I think only Blizzard know if WoW could support that.

It would help a megaton.

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I mean in this case I’m not sure being to communicate would help. If I were in a group with somebody that was casting wrath in caster form as a Feral it’d be a leveling dungeon and in that case I’d just let them do their thing.

It’s usually quite possible to play with each other despite a language barrier. The majority of content doesn’t really require any communication aside from maybe cds.

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You can’t. Put a Japanese line into google translate, it comes out very terribly mistranslated. That’s why often times the line from a anime subb to anime dub is saying the same thing but in a total different way. And then there’s considering 100+ languages in the world, you can’t account for all that.

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Not every language will have the same results, but surely Spanish to English will do well enough? And French shouldn’t be too bad.

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FFXIV has something like this actually, however its not big. Basically, they have preformed words that auto translate to another person’s client language like <hello> or <limit break>, etc. It’s got a lot of words but nowhere near enough to fully communicate because too many words for too many things, and often times…too many words for the same 1 meaning.

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