I want to toss this one at the neckbeards in Iceland and see what they think about it. I was pondering why no MMO game to date has translated chat on the fly? Instead you all get lax and make the same chat engine with rooms labeled by language. I am not a coder, but it seems pretty simple, if one thinks about it.
To carry a conversation, one only needs to understand 5,000 to 6,000 spoken words. There are 3 vocabularies; spoken, reading, and written. The largest is your spoken and the smallest is your written. I am a writer and I still need spell checker.
Most adults have a vocabulary range of 20,000 to 35,000 words, but the lowest will always be the written vocabulary. Our PC office processors contain dictionaries well beyond that in a simple text file. Since the game identifies me as an English speaker, I would have the English dictionary on my game chat and the words could get translated by a most simplistic process. Matching line numbers would convert my sentence using the dictionary into line numbers. Those numbers on the non-English would then be received and converted back into words the other players could understand.
I hope I explained that well enough for everyone to understand. I am not a programmer but I do know the dictionary in my office word processor says it is less than one megabyte in size. It would not add all that much to the current client program. German, Russian, Spanish, French, Polish, and English could all talk to each other with one chat and eliminate the divide between us.
As I said, I am aware of no game using a translated chat. This is my point, tech now is at our fingertips but the developers refuse to use it. For 3rd party chat translation, you need to have a browser up to copy paste to Google. It is cumbersome and could be done within the game, without adding much more to it. Also how are you going to chat to a party of mixed languages? If I was in a fleet with chat translated for us on the fly, I can give instructions once and everyone reads it in their native language just as fast as we chat in game. This game already depends far too much on 3rd party tools.
I understood you so if I did, most everyone else did too.
I think they don’t have what you are asking for, even though it is possible and would not require a lot of dev time, because it will not make them money. It’s as simple as that.
While you think your idea a good one, and it very well may be, it is simply not a good one for one simple reason.
The code on Tranquility is a massive, tangled nightmare that is affectionately referred to as The Giant Spaghetti Monster. Over the last 21 years of updates, patches, mechanic removal, and other changes, the stability of the code has declined to the point CCP doesn’t have the ability to add their own code to it without at least half a dozen other systems breaking. The most recent example, instituting the new skin system, caused 8 different sections of the game to crash that we know of, including the login server. Skins took down the login server, that’s how much of a mess EvE code is. Chat translation is far more complicated than that.
When you perform a benefit analysis with this in mind, a chat translation tool really isn’t a good idea. The vast majority of anything you can’t read in EvE says something very similar to what you can read.
Well my neighbor just stopped by and showed me on his tablet. A game 2.35 GB called Doomsday: Last Survivors with translated chat. The person said something in chat he couldn’t read and by pressing a button it translated. So a 2.35 tablet game is able to do this but a generic chat program I have seen before here in Eve is too complicated? I don’t think so.
I guess it could technically work, but I see some complications:
EVE jargon is already unreadable for people outside or new to the game and a majority of the chat that happens in this game is EVE jargon. “Align to the gate”, “cyno up in XY-AB1”, “scram that boosher!”, “who is bringing skirmish links?” If you were to automatically translate EVE chat to EVE chat in a different language CCP will have to make their custom translator or do additional training of an existing translation model to expand an existing translator with enough EVE-speak for the translations to even make sense in another EVE-speak language. That isn’t nearly as easy as connecting all chat to google translate or a competitor.
Chat server reliability is not 100% in EVE, even though we all wish it to be because chat is an important part of the game. I can imagine that with every additional complicated system like translators integrated into the chat system the reliability can only go futher down. I don’t know if that’s worth it.
In EVE people generally group up with others who speak shared languages, so for regular gameplay it’s rarely needed either to have an ingame translation option. And in the rare case someone does talk to me in a language I do not understand I can always copy-paste local chat into one of the existing translators to see if I understand enough of the translated words in between the wrongly translated EVE jargon to see if I catch the meaning of whatever the other player is trying to say.
i used to play a game called Tibia a low tech 2D Fantasy MMO, during its prime i was part of a group which used the in game “Orcish Language” as a foundation to communicate between english, brazilian and polish players, however it was only a small group which did this and eventually died off.
the orcish language was translated into English, but the English words were also translated into whatever language was needed, allowing people to have basic communication.
maybe we don’t need to start with huge fleet co-ordination just yet, especially as there are tools for broadcasting targets, reps etc and ship links and fitted doctrines are already a thing
Doctrine (links ship)
meet: “system name” (i don’t know if system names are displayed differently across the different linguistical versons of the game).
however OP’s idea of having a system which translates chat in game gets a +1 from me.
if it was something done client side with an opt in feature, those who wanted to use it could do so without it being mandatory.
personally i’m for the 100% translation of all written text within a system to your chosen language, but i already got heavily flamed for the idea.
if we’re not working to improve eve, it’ll fall behind
if we’re not going to get something built in or 3rd party to translate across languages.
then the next best thing would be to create a constructed language for all players to use, probably best to start small with joint linguistic mining operations and work up from there.
Well I do speak some German ( natives of where I live in the US here speak polish, russian, and german ) however I am told my spelling is horrible. But allow me to translate those;
Align to the gate and Who is bringing the skirmish links has no jargon. It is “Auf das tor” I am replacing the word align here with aim since I don’t know the word align or I could say “Ziel ist das tor” which is The goal is the gate. While the words like “cyno” and “boosher” are indeed game jargon, anyone who has used a spell checker know how this is fixed very fast. You simply add it to your dictionary. There has been a few a times my spell checker won’t identify a word, if I know for a fact it is spelled correctly, I just right click and add word. CCP would need to add a list of jargon to the dictionary. Users could update their own copies as well.
Nothing is perfect, all I am suggesting is more options to remove barriers. I know for a fact there are people out there who are willing to play together. Language barriers are keeping them apart.
For all the naysayers, it is still a wonderful idea to bring something like this in game.
Until, then I will still use ctrl-C, ctrl-V in google translate.
Technology has simplified many tasks that humans had to do at work as well as home. Computing power and data storage capabilities have allowed translation in virtually all languages. We now have devices smaller than a phone that translates in real time, vocally and instantaneously.
It is for the sake of simplicity that programs have evolved to what they are today. Game engines, picture, music tools… all are designed towards that end. User-friendly.
To require every EVE player to learn English is opposite to simplicity.
English is the most widely-spoken language on the planet. In order to participate in Rookie Help Chat, it has to be in English. The simplest thing to do is learn the language the game is based on, instead of having to come up with a translator for 137 thousand different languages and dialects.
I am a coder, and yes, implementing it sloppily is pretty simple.
Implementing it well, in the sense that it won’t just generate 100s more posts/complaints about how bad the translations are, is a whole other story.
Wrong, Spanish is the most widely-spoken language. Statistics argue it is Mandarin Chinese however it is contained mostly to one country, China, and not as global as Spanish.
Mandarin Chinese
Spanish
English
Arabic
Hindi
Bengali
Portuguese
Russian
Japanese
Western Punjabi
As you can see, German and Polish don’t even make it in the top ten. So start practicing your Mandarin or Spanish there Quake God. English is in third place. Why am I getting the vibe, you just reject the idea of mit der auslandern spielen?
@Trevor_Dalech I am pretty sure people won’t get told to cover their grandmother with cheese sauce, when you tell them to attack your target. Even if they did get the message, I am almost certain few of them would try.
So what you are telling me is Eve isn’t as good as old buggy code. If you read this thread, instead of skimming it, you would have understood.
I know I won’t get a developer to reply, but I think this is awful to have a positive ideas thread and nothing but salty players shooting ideas down. I see only 2 or 3 people who didn’t reply with an attitude about an idea. So much for a creative and productive process here with this bunch CCP.
Talk to yourselves about it, I am muting it.
Have fun!
At the Summit this past February I actually brought this up. What I asked was a simplified language of basics that would be translated for basic fleet orders. Align, target, dock, etc.
Not a full language but just basics so a fleet could function a cross language barriers. Over the years I have acted as typing relay for fleets that had people with speakers and or were hard of hearing.
But I can tell you that the basics of this idea HAS been brought to CCP already “I was there.”
