Player Features and Ideas Discussion

No, it will not work. Every automated translation tool is incapable of properly translating/interpreting the stuff that we throw into chats. It will cause more confusion or irritation in the worst, or mere amusement in the best case. Just try to translate the stuff that you see in Jita, especially Cyrillic or Corean, Chinese, Japanese, with Bing Translator, Google Translator or any of the other AT tools, you only get gibberish from it. It is in most cases not even helpful to gain a general or rough idea what people are talking about.

It may be ironic to some, but our local chat is more of a social network hub.

Now, I mean that in the sense social networks actually operate, as their business model.

The people are the product, and they are sold to those who wish to advertise to them, like in Jita, or to track their activity, like in null sov space where such intel is used for decision making above other expected in game tools available.

Actual conversations tend to happen most often between those in limited channels, like fleet, corp or alliance chats.
And that assumes they are not using 3rd party voice coms entirely.

Quite simply, for many, actually chatting in local itself is simply too random for serious usage.

At one point I had two Russian corps in my alliance. Communication was a PITA. Even using google translate I had to double check everything to be sure it was translating correctly, and 9 times out of 10 I had to use my brain to figure out a word did not mean what google said it did. Add in slang and it was a bloody *****. I had to have a guy who could speak Russian translate, and even then we had some confusion.

I would, however do it again, that Russian corp, though they stuck to themselves, were bad ass if they got in a fleet or did a group activity with us. All I had to do was point and say shoot that, or mine that, and they did.