In-Game Translator?

Community General Discussion
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Given that servers were joined in recent times, what is everyone’s opinion on an add-on or in-game translator to help alleviate language barriers?

I don’t think anyone like the stress of not understanding your group or people in it, from any side. While I understand only wanting to group with those which you cannot communicate–and I also understand not wanting to have yet another addon–it could be useful.

Reasonable? Or ridiculous?

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The technology does not exist. People think that computers can do everything and anything. They can’t. It’s a nice idea, if it existed.

“Google translate” is the best that exists right now. I use it a lot. It is pretty good for 2-word prases (though it doesn’t know the hundreds of MMO terms in any language), but I’ve never seen it correctly translate a 6-word or longer sentence. Language simply is more complicated than that. English words often have 20 or 30 meanings, and Google can’t pick the right one.

If you have 2 monitors you can try it now: keep google translate up on the other monitor and cut-and-past things. Of coure you won’t know if it is correct unless you are fluent in both languages. But if you get in that situation, it may be helpful.

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Unfortunately, we can’t copy text from chat to paste it anywhere. I suppose a translator would help a bit, but it would be much too hard to develop from scratch. Blizzard would have to buy the service from Google, which would probably also get is in-game ads :frowning:

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False, auto translate functions have been around in mmos for 15+years. See FFXI

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In Hearthstone, they handled this by not allowing free text communication and just giving you a small number of emotes that will be presented in the language the recipient selected.

No reason WoW couldn’t have something like that for its base emotes, which could handle simple situations.

That’s not going to be enough for complicated progression raids or other meaningful strategy discussions, and even a pretty good automated translator is still probably too slow / too confusing. For the limited amount of content that requires true coordination, ultimately you need language compatibility.

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I took two years of Spanish and I can translate most of what people in random dungeons say, but 90% of the time it’s “I need to take a smoke break”.

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Yes, but auto-translate in XI and XIV are only made up of stock game terms and basic phrases. A very useful tool, but it isn’t a real-time translator which is what it sounds like the OP is asking for.

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All of this is very true.
Google translate may be good for some languages, but it can be terrible with certain languages.

I can vouch that it does a poor job when it comes to English ⇄ Japanese.
I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had a good chuckle with some very messed up translations.

And like he / she said, others wouldn’t know if the translation is correct unless they are fluent in both languages.

So yes, it might be useful for some languages, but not all.

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This man is correct, also you could use googles auto translate api’s to provide more depth than that tool if you wanted. the FFXII tool was awesome. Most common phrases and then a very large library of indiviudal words could be used and would translate into the localized language of our client.

A thing long past due.

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Lol, because that’s going to turn out as well as google translate…

Which is not very well at all causing more misunderstandings.

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I think it would be great to have google translate to your native language. We have alot of Spanish speaking players on our server group. I speak some Spanish, but not enough to effectively communicate. I would love to see this feature.

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Wow necro…

Just separate off Latin realms to their own server group and don’t put them into the same LFG / LFR / RBG queues as English speaking realms. Between language barriers, latency and downright bad players, most people hate seeing players from those realms in their groups.

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necro again. Technology like this DOES exist!

I see it in phone games all the time, where coordinated attacks and guild activities are required (clash of clans -like games.)

I think it would be great if blizzard could utilise something similar to break down language barriers.

For slang terms and gamer context based speech, the phone games had a system where it used players to help improve the translation system… you could earn a small amount of currency each day, by suggesting what the correct translation of a slang term was, so the system kept improving itself.

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Addon to transcribe chat, into a raw text, export to translation database such as google auto detect. And send back into game via personal user interface.

Sadly this can be worked to mitigate, npc and faction language barriers.

Additionally the second it would send anything to another player (post translation automatically) it would break the EULA due to message/spam automation. (But dbm does it so… and so do other addons…)

A simple universal command wheel with.
Raid marker, ground marker
Kill, Evade, Stack, Soak, request trade of (linked item)
To copy paste or quick text via in game seleted languages like on console games or moba’s could be handy.

And per user interface included under the colorblind/communication options

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I know this is old-- But I was recently talking with someone about this.

I could easily make a piece of software that translates the chat. It would use ChatGPT though. I could write it in python, it would capture screenshots of WoW, specifically the region for the chatbox. it would translate it for you using Tesseract image processing, then you could type out your response in chat- it would take another screenshot, and translate that into their language and you could hit a button and it would send the translated message in WoW chat.

I am unsure if it would be against ToS or not-- the last bit would be an automation where it hits enter, types out the message and hits enter again. – Which I dunno

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I suppose you could just prop up a phone or tablet and point the camera at the chat. Then use an existing realtime translator.

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Out of curiosity, did you look up WoW forum topics that you thought that you may have a helpful answer to?

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