Player Features and Ideas Discussion

While flying the other day, I witnessed one of many conversations in a language I do not speak. I keep Google translate in my bookmarks and quickly grabbed the convo, dropped it in.

It was not a secret plot to find my ship and kill me, just some casual chatter. I used translate to say good morning, dropped it in, and continued to mine.

Surprisingly, I was then spoken to for the next hour and felt pleased with myself. But it was complicated to keep grabbing, translating and posting.

It then occurred to me, we play a game in future space, in bodies that are cloned, with chips to learn new skills... and we can't even converse. Poor reference, but where's our universal translator?

So, I am asking about the possibility? A setting you choose to enable, that does not translate everything, but perhaps gives you the option (if enabled) to click a sentence, translate, and see the selected sentence in your native language?

This way, it won't be system intensive, having to check each and every word. It will only be enabled if you choose to do so, and it will only translate the conversation to choose to translate.

Now, to prove a point, I will bounce a sentence through google translate from English, through German, back, then through Spanish and back, then through Russian and back. Then I added Japanese for giggles.

EN original.
Word by word translations make a hash out of the meaning of many languages.

German:
Wort für Wort Übersetzungen machen einen Hash aus der Bedeutung von vielen Sprachen.

EN- from german:
Word for word translations make a hash of the importance of many languages ​​. (comprehensible, but english is mixed germanic and romance in syntax and structure)

^ to spanish:
Word para traducciones de las palabras hace un hash de la importancia de muchos idiomas.

Spanish to english:
Word for word translations makes a hash of the importance of many languages. (good consistency inside romance languages)

^ to russian:
Слово для перевода слов делает хэш значение многих языках

Back to english:
Word for word translation makes the hash value of the multi-lingual.

^ to japanese:
単語翻訳のための単語は、多言語のハッシュ値を作る

Japanese to english:
Word for word translation , make the hash value of the multi- language.

As you can see, the default answer (because it is one of the best free options) does not do well with translations.

If you really want to make a hash of things, run it through Telugu and then pretty much any cyrillic language, and then back into English. The meaning is almost guaranteed to change.

c.f.
Can we pretend that the hurricanes that I fly are like avatars

becomes

I can not pretend that we can fly as incarnations of hurricanes.

I was more making a point that one of the best sets of software could not reliably translate a fairly simple S-V(t)-PC sentence, and that anything CCP codes in this field is likely to be costly, redundant, buggy and unreliable, and as such, I do not think it is worth the dev time or licensing cost to put this into the client as a CCP coded feature, or as a licensed 3rd party module.

Google translate has a team being paid for that particular software, and amazing support. There is no reason, save marginal convenience, to not use it.

EVE is a game company, nor a translator service... Also translating languages is actually incredible hard work which many countries continously struggle with.

For example, in my native tongue of Danish we have a word: Hygge and/or Hyggelig. Which roughly translates to a mixture of the words cozy, fun, satisfied etc. However, it cannot be directly translated.

Big, unfocused publisher Vs. CCP, where many of us can rattle off the call signs of 90% of the outward facing staff, and who focus on one game almost to exclusion.

I am pretty certain that the 'translator' that Square uses is just fixed lists of phrases that they have pre-done translations for. It just displays the translation you want depending on your client's language setting.

Pre-done translated phrases doesn't seem too hard to do, but actually implementing it into the client might cross into some Legacy Code™ and might get some patent infringement cases running.

CCP are english devs, devs are used to contently bashing there heads against titanium walls, but if you are asking them to figure out how to translate into different languages properly you are obviously not seeing how thick this wall is.

To be done properly it would require hours of work, enough to say that they would have to redo the entire game. Translations are extremely complex, stupid and large subjects in the programming world, there's a reason the internet is standardized in english.

The only way that an ingame translator would be logical, is if they somehow use google translator API, and manage to implement it into the game properly. In hopes that they wont need to water mark lots of crap with Google on it in game.

Still, translators are at best usually terrible. I don't personally think it would be a good idea to do this because most conversations are impossible with only translators because of how complex this task actually is.

Why not make a deal with GoogleTranslate and Code an optional plugin?
Then the text would be sent from the client to google, "translated" and then back to the client again.
Displayed with a colored backround. Bandwidth use: minor. Client side traffic.
How much work to set it up? no idea.
How much work to maintain? less than doing everything yourself!