Automatic machine translator in game chat
BurritoBazooka created issue #1346 (old tracker) on 2012-11-19T00:11:53Z:
It’s pretty clear that the Xonotic community is a very international one. Most of the people I play with are probably German, and there even came a couple of French people in today, and one guy with a Cryllic display name.
Luckily for me, I could learn German at school, and having Afrikaans as first language helps a lot too. But it’s only a tiny bit that I really understand. I can’t put a sentence together without getting genders and tenses very wrong (Afrikaans has far less pervasive use of tenses).
But if I could not understand any German, I can just think I wouldn’t like it very much, and I wouldn’t become such a long-term member of the community. For example, if a game had an English GUI, and all the players were Japanese, unwilling to speak English for my sake, I wouldn’t feel so comfortable playing it in multiplayer. Because of this diversity, it is clearly unreasonable for servers to impose rules on people, saying that they must type in one language. The only way I can think of to help overcome language barriers without ordering people around, at the moment, is very quickly transfer something that someone said in X language to a language I can understand.
Does anyone concur about this problem? I think it would be very convenient to have an option in the settings to enable translation of text ‘on-the-fly’. I think Google Translate does a reasonable job at translating French and German. You know, for a machine :) I think it would really help as the community grows, so we can at least understand each other to some extent while playing, and cooperate, and perform teamwork, all things which are needed for team-based multiplayer gameplay.