Tabletop Simulator adds support for 29 languages, but it's all Google Translate

[Kthulhu]

The headline feature is Tabletop Simulator now supports translations for all 29 languages supported by Steam. The game has been translated with the help of google translate but we also added support for creating your own translations and sharing them on the Workshop. Using google translate is an exciting jumping off point for a more global user friendly experience, however, recognizing google translate's limitations we are also excited to see what native speakers in the community can come up with for the most authentic multilingual game play experience. Furthermore, the translation support is extended to all of your great mods out there. Now players can participate in the same game with different localized text or assets based on their selected language.

We've also upgraded the game's engine (everything should run smoother), added layout zones (automatically lay out cards easily), and added object tags (easily filter system interactions).

We have a bunch of other great new features, upgrades, and fixes you can read about all below.

Finally we are launching a new method for collecting user feedback and bug reports found at https://tabletopsimulator.nolt.io/.

This will allow us to better connect with the community for a more fluid and streamlined feedback loop, including increased visibility into our process. The new system allows you to easily make suggestions and upvote and downvote other community member ideas in a similar style to reddit. Additionally, the community will now be able to see our progress on implementing suggestions, fixes, and new features through the roadmap tool.

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Source: https://steamcommunity.com/games/TabletopSimulator/announcements/detail/3024698921216466933

So naturally the community seems pretty pissed about how awful the translations are:

French:



Japanese:



Also they want the users to do any additional translating themselves:



As of now on their feedback system they also released recently, requests for better translations is the top voted request. The admin did say they'd remove the bit on the store page advertising the language support at the very least.

Source: https://tabletopsimulator.nolt.io/122

I'll try to find some more funny translation examples if I can. Some people on Twitter have been tearing these apart. Feel free to post your own examples and I'll try to highlight them.

Please lock/merge the thread if old.

 

[Soap]

I have to imagine the tabletop simulator team are tiny, so I don't think they are being disingenuous with their statement. I mean much bigger companies can't even be bothered to translate some of their games (looking at you, Nintendo).

 

[Windu]

Better than nothing I'd guess.

 

[LiK]

wow

 

[5taquitos]

I have to imagine the tabletop simulator team are tiny, so I don't think they are being disingenuous with their statement. I mean much bigger companies can't even be bothered to translate some of their games (looking at you, Nintendo).

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For real, I don't see the value in blasting them for this.

Edit: After seeing subsequent posts here, I now see the value in blasting them.

 

[Obi]

Machine translation is kinda a neat feature. You just can't advertise that you actually support those languages. Putting it on their store page is really where they went wrong. I know back in the day I would have loved having menus and stuff auto translated on imported games.

 

[Kthulhu]

I have to imagine the tabletop simulator team are tiny, so I don't think they are being disingenuous with their statement. I mean much bigger companies can't even be bothered to translate some of their games (looking at you, Nintendo).

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Some of the translations don't even fit in their UI. You can't tell me this is the best they could do even if funds or manpower were the issues.



They could've at the very least done what Linux devs or some Youtubers do and offer to work with people in the community.

 

[FPX]

Better than nothing I'd guess.

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It's actually worse than nothing. Experienced and paid translators often say fixing google translate stuff is sometimes harder than translating the source material directly. It's also a guaranteed way for issues to arise, telephone-game style (An english translation of a japanese manga chapter will always be better than a japanese chapter translated to another language, and THEN english)

 

[UnluckyKate]

Jig Saw puzzle translated as a reciprocating blade is hilarious (jigsaw, the tool)

 

[Patitoloco]

Imagine using Google Translate when stuff like Localizor exists.

 

[Hella]

I have to imagine the tabletop simulator team are tiny, so I don't think they are being disingenuous with their statement. I mean much bigger companies can't even be bothered to translate some of their games (looking at you, Nintendo).

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It's not fair to call straight machine translations actual "translations" though. In no way does it actually function as intended.

What the Tabletop Simulator devs are doing is offloading all translation/localisation work to the community and then guilt tripping their fans into providing TTS with "official" translations. Crowdsourcing development is exploitative at its core, but even worse is how disingenuously this process is being sold to people.

There's a way to crowdsource translations in a way that isn't abjectly terrible and the TTS devs seem to have chosen the exact opposite route to take.

 

[Ragnar Blackmane]

The パン/pan/bread thing is killing me LMAO.

 

[Aurica]

So many people are unwilling to pay professional translators... "We'll just let the community fix it and get free labor!"

The パン/pan/bread thing is killing me LMAO.

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ヒント&ヒント is my favorite.

 

[rpm]

"here's some google translated shit, if you don't like it, get off your ass and do it yourself (for free, of course, we sure as hell ain't gonna pay you)"

 

[Kapryov]

"Using google translate is an exciting jumping off point... however, recognizing google translate's limitations we are also excited to see what native speakers in the community can come up with for the most authentic multilingual game play experience"

translation: We don't believe in paying people so we've intentionally released it broken. Please fix it yourselves.

edit: too slow, I took too long translating, lol

 

[808s & Villainy]

It's actually worse than nothing. Experienced and paid translators often say fixing google translate stuff is sometimes harder than translating the source material directly. It's also a guaranteed way for issues to arise, telephone-game style (An english translation of a japanese manga chapter will always be better than a japanese chapter translated to another language, and THEN english)

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Well paid translators would presumably be translating the English version not fixing the Google translated versions, so that wouldn't be a concern anyway.

The only real issue is them not making it clear from the start they were Google translations

 

[Theswweet]

Please don't try and defend this. Unless you work in games localization, it might be hard to see how this is a problem, but there really is *no* excuse for them to use MTL and then try and crowd-source the rest of the TLs.

...SuperGiant did something similar with Hades, and I very much would hope this doesn't become a trend.



They had a response, but it appears that they've deleted it after they got called out on how weak it was.

Edit: Looks like they've learned, at least.

 

[Hella]

Please don't try and defend this. Unless you work in games localization, it might be hard to see how this is a problem, but there really is *no* excuse for them to use MTL and then try and crowd-source the rest of the TLs.

...SuperGiant did something similar with Hades, and I very much would hope this doesn't become a trend.



They had a response, but it appears that they've deleted it after they got called out on how weak it was.

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I didn't realise Supergiant did that with Hades, that's a real bummer. Hades thrives on the character writing and stripping that out is inexcusable.

Really wonder what's going through folks' heads when they decide to babelfish their entire game.

 

[Dogui]

No low budget dev would be able to support 29 languages otherwise. Also, it's not even a narrative driven game, i think it was ultimately a good call by the devs.

I'm willing to bet the entire Era community understands english for obvious reasons so it's not something we can just resonate with, but for a lot of people, google translations are literally what makes a game like this playable.

 

[Theswweet]

No low budget dev would be able to support 29 languages otherwise. Also, it's not even a narrative driven game, i think it was ultimately a good call by the devs.

I'm willing to bet the entire Era community understands english for obvious reasons so it's not something we can just resonate with, but for a lot of people, google translations are literally what makes a game like this playable.

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I'm willing to bet that you don't actually know more than one language. Machine translations are, in many cases, worse than no translation at all. Especially when we have so many examples *in this thread* where the "gesture" just makes things more confusing.

 

[Tetsujin]

Honestly, no translation seems better than a shitty translation that'll turn your game into a joke

 

[Cantaim]

Gonna be honest not even the slightest bit impressed. I've seen very small video game translation projects use Google Translate more effectively by at least paying someone to edit the auto text dumps to make sure that they are at least useable and not complete garbage. The way the devs did it hear is so lacking in care I feel offended for the 29 other languages on principal.


*As someone that dabbles in playing games in languages I don't speak. A raw Google Translation text dump into your game is worse then no translation. Depending on how large the script is, it descends into absolute gibberish.

 

[Dogui]

I'm willing to bet that you don't actually know more than one language. Machine translations are, in many cases, worse than no translation at all. Especially when we have so many examples *in this thread* where the "gesture" just makes things more confusing.

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English is not my native language. Posting on Era means i need to understand atleast 2 languages :p

No translation means you can't play the game if you don't understand the default language. Not being able to play the game is better than that?

Do you understand that people actually noticing how bad machine translations are will never use these translations because they are playing it in english already, for starters?

No matter how bad is something using google translation, it makes the game accessible to a whole new potential playerbase.

 

[ookiimarukochan]

Do you understand that people actually noticing how bad machine translations are will never use these translations because they are playing it in english already, for starters?

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I can assure you that the Japanese translations shown are more than bad enough that people who speak no English will be able to tell you how bad they are.
For Japanese there are a ton of indie games with shit tier pro translations too, Beyond a Steel Sky was the most recent one I saw, where the translation agency they used sourced someone who didn't know any games terms and so just came up with their own neologisms (this happens more often than you'd think with E->J translation)

 

[TheChrisGlass]

Better than nothing I'd guess.

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I strongly disagree. This does so much to damage a reputation.

Basically a language can be broken in a myriad of ways.

Missing characters, words no longer fitting on the screen, context being COMPLETELY wrong or lost.

So you end up with a broken or ugly UI. You get something completely missing in the story. Intent is lost. Especially without context. Just mindless words being thrown into a machine and spit out do no good.

That doesn't even include any crashes, instability, loading issues, or other crap that comes with just throwing these things without checking it.

 

[Dogui]

I can assure you that the Japanese translations shown are more than bad enough that people who speak no English will be able to tell you how bad they are.
For Japanese there are a ton of indie games with shit tier pro translations too, Beyond a Steel Sky was the most recent one I saw, where the translation agency they used sourced someone who didn't know any games terms and so just came up with their own neologisms (this happens more often than you'd think with E->J translation)

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Can't say anything about E -> J translations, but as someone that played the Gagharv LoH games on PSP, trust me when i say i can relate with that. But i'm happy these versions exists nonetheless because that was the only way i could play them.

Tabletop Simulator is not as bad anyway since there's no narrative to the games. Doesn't mean it's not bad, just that it's better than nothing.

That said, of course the devs could do some edits for the sillier translations, tho hard to know if the devs even know half of those languages themselves.

 

[Adnor]

My cynical self says that they did it because they know most people online won't care or will only laugh because the English version is fine, but if it was English one of the languages it got this awful treatment people would get mad, saying how insulting is that a company that sold 3 million units won't even bother to pay a translator.

Having 29 languages on Steam will help them sell more, because that way people won't get the message saying that the game isn't in their language, and they know fans will do better translations for them for free in at least the largest languages.

It's honestly disgusting. Fuck them.

EDIT: Oh at least they took out the part that says that they support 29 languages. Still inexcusable. Translation is a real job.

 

[Mendrox]

I'm willing to bet that you don't actually know more than one language. Machine translations are, in many cases, worse than no translation at all. Especially when we have so many examples *in this thread* where the "gesture" just makes things more confusing.

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This is pretty funny on Resetera (or even nowadays at all, I would wager most people at least know two languages outside the US at least).

But yeah Google Translating things is pretty bad or rather the worst thing to use. Last year I tried deepl.com a lot and that thing was amazing. Pretty pretty pretty good and amazed me a lot.

 

[Mobyduck]

I worked for some time translating indie games, and, while the vast majority will give players the tool to translate the game for free and put it up on the Workshop or directly into the game, a few will actually pay people for their work and a few will just Google Translate and hope people either finish their work or just let it be.

I'm surprised that a game like Tabletop Simulator, which is so highly dependent on the Workshop, would not simply let people upload their translations there so other players can use it.

 

[Deleted member 11370]

This is pretty funny on Resetera (or even nowadays at all, I would wager most people at least know two languages outside the US at least).

But yeah Google Translating things is pretty bad or rather the worst thing to use. Last year I tried deepl.com a lot and that thing was amazing. Pretty pretty pretty good and amazed me a lot.

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Yep, DeepL is a machine translation engine based on actual machine learning. It's nothing short of amazing sometimes, but it works better in longer texts, where context and cotext are easier to parse. I don't know if it would be very useful here, since most of what I've seen are simply isolated words or very short descriptive phrases.

For example, translators are sometimes given a list of all the words that appear in a script or game, without any context. If you saw "lead", you'd have to try to guess whether it's "lead programmer", "lead the metal", "lead the verb"... I've been there, I know how difficult it may be to work like that. A machine will never do better than a human if the human is having issues in the first place.

 

[seroun]

This is even worse than Supergiant asking people to translate for free.

If you can't translate, that's a pity, but okay, but don't break your UI with a bad translation imo?

 

[Comrade Grogu]

As a primarily English-speaker, should I get Tabletop Simulator or just stick to Roll20?

 

[SPRidley]

I mean, studios like wayforward already use google or machine translated tranlations for some of its languages (the spanish ones for the shantae series... my god) so its nothing new.

At least they came forward to tell people they actually used google translate here because there are some that or use it and dont say anything, or they have been ripped off by the "translator" they hired.

I would tell them though to use other transaltors than are not google, because google one is pretty awful.

And its seems its just like the base so the community can actually change it themselves, which a lot of other smaller studios already do with mods (or using fan translations for a real update, for example the spanish one for Disco Elysium is being made by fans as the own studio said they never will do the spanish one, but know they will add the fan one because it has been done super profesionaly, though im sure they are actually paying now for it).

For all it say and done, i actually applaud smaller studios that actually pay for real spanish translations of their games, and is usually something that makes me buy the game to reward that effort.
Not Tonight has an amazing spanish translation where i actually found the the translator as one of the steam reviewers and i cogratualted him for such a great job. He is also super nice and told me he even worked for spanish nintendo translators duribg the rhythm heaven and wario ware days (and those translations were spectacular, even the manuals).

 

[Hero of Legend]

Boy that reeks of "why pay for professionals when we can half-ass it with Google Translate and let the fans do the rest or free!".

 

[Adnor]

And its seems its just like the base so the community can actually change it themselves, which a lot of other smaller studios already do with mods (or using fan translations for a real update, for example the spanish one for Disco Elysium is being made by fans as the own studio said they never will do the spanish one, but know they will add the fan one because it has been done super profesionaly, though im sure they are actually paying now for it).

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Yeah the Disco Elysium devs licensed the ClanDLAN translation, they paid them.

 

[SPRidley]

Yeah the Disco Elysium devs licensed the ClanDLAN translation, they paid them.

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Thats good then, ClanDlan really deserves it, not only for the great work i was seeing from the screens they showed, but becuase they are absolute legends making patches to reinstall the old spanish version to GoG games that dont have them anymore and things like that.

 

[Adnor]

Thats good then, ClanDlan really deserves it, not only for the great work i was seeing from the screens they showed, but becuase they are absolute legends making patches to reinstall the old spanish version to GoG games that dont have them anymore and things like that.

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So I checked, it's not "technically" ClanDLAN for contract reasons, but it does mention them in the credits as a thank you and they paid the individual members of ClanDLAN that worked in the translation.

 

[SPRidley]

So I checked, it's not "technically" ClanDLAN for contract reasons, but it does mention them in the credits as a thank you and they paid the individual members of ClanDLAN that worked in the translation.

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Well if they are paid thats what it counts :D