Translate for game chat

There should be a way to translate chats so people can talk to each other live.

What about https://translate.google.com/ or DeepL Translate: The world's most accurate translator in another tab?

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If the topic of your conversation is asking your opponent to undo their move so you can request to undo yours, that would be better solved by making the undo button work on your move thus obviating the need to chat at all. Allow undo request on your move

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My take on this: seems technically possible, but would incur cost - we’d have to hit a translation server at a rate that would not be free.

I wonder if “Supporters” would like to see this in general, or whether it’d be a sane “user pays” kind of service?

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There’s another option which is not to translate messages by default and only on request. (one could imagine limits on that also if it would still hit a limit)

Another thing I’ve see is on Board Game Arena where beside a message they’ll show a popup on hover like

image

I hadn’t clicked it before now, but it seems to just go straight to google translate in a new tab to translate the message.

In the games and game tutorials they instead have a user contributed translation for the different words and strings, probably not dissimilar to what OGS has.

Their forums might be something similar in that it runs a script and then asks if you want to contribute to a better translation.

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only $20 per 1 million characters:

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Paying for a google service :rofl:

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I’m not sure I get the joke? There are various google services you definitely have to pay for (including storage over ~20G in google drive).

I agree that doesn’t sound like much, though a million is a pretty small number of characters in the scheme of things - there are currently 4000 characters sitting in the “Help Chat” channel alone. Translating that for the 25 viewers arrives at 100,000 translated characters in a flash.

(of course, you’d only translate once per language really, I’m just illustrating that things add up fast).

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I meant more for games than the forums here. People chat much less in games, but having translate can help bridge divide, also I cannot change the topic to reflect this important detail, can a mod help please?

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Maybe there are free translator services, although I don’t know the quality.
:rofl:

Monty Python: Dirty Hungarian Phrasebook

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Yes, only translating when the user needs a translation, on their request, as shinuito points out is also a great idea for in-game chat and I bet the entire site can be done in less than the $20/million characters limit. Maybe someone with access to the database can make an analysis of how many characters are chatted in-game each month so we can have an idea of the cost?

The total characters chatted would be a worst-case scenario. More realistically, maybe only 50%-5% of games would actually use the feature. And…assuming the feature gets implemented, it can always be deactivated if costs are too high, but I doubt that would happen.

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Translating on request does sound cool.

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