To be honest, I’ve never been that much of a fan of the use of translation HUDs in Second Life, or the use of the built-in chat-translation feature – both of which use Google Translate. Mechanical translation systems tend to produce some awfully wild – and frequently unintentionally hilarious – results when it comes to conversational or instructional uses of language.
Nevertheless, these options – or at least the ones using the Google Translate API – are going away and have now been rate-limited. Google feels its translation API service has been suffering from abuse.
Google has published this notice:
The Google Translate API has been officially deprecated as of May 26, 2011. Due to the substantial economic burden caused by extensive abuse, the number of requests you may make per day will be limited and the API will be shut off completely on December 1, 2011. For website translations, we encourage you to use the Google Translate Element.
I cannot help but wonder how much of that financial burden is from Second Life users with translation HUDs, or with the built-in translation feature enabled. I imagine that usage could run to a substantial amount.
Update (3 June 2011): Google will be transitioning the API to a paid-service rather than closing it entirely. At this time, no pricing has been announced.
Hmm. I’ve always used the X-LANG hud myself and liked it. It’s come in very handy at times when assisting non-English-speaking newbies. Still waiting to hear back from the creator if it uses the Google API, or perhaps someone reading this knows.
The more you use it the more likely it won’t be there later (or will be too expensive) to use. Go figure. Ka-ching ka-ching.
Internet is fun, huh?
Makes me wonder how many thousands (or tens-of-thousands) of Second Life users have one of the translation systems more or less permanently on.
Yeah, me too. It’s an “as needed” tool for certain. But don’t bother asking anyone to lower their footprint unless you enjoy being snapped at. “It’s all just supposed to work whatever I do and it’s not my problem,” usually rules the day. Ah, well.
What this boils down to is the start of a service cascade failure.
The trick will be to find a service that doesn’t do similar in the near future.
All of that Google Translate API traffic is going to go somewhere. Everyone will be casting around for an alternative service. So the load will remain the same, but there will be N-1 services to handle that load. The burden of the cost of the service, therefore, will shift to whomever becomes the next popular favourite. Likely, they’ll end up restricting their service also, to control their costs.
Rinse, repeat – stable or increasing load divided amongst a shrinking pool of service providers, until what we’re left with are those services that have some way to bill for the load.
Microsoft also offers online APIs for language translation via AJAX, HTTP, and SOAP. So that’s a possible substitute, although I had a hard time finding a page cleanly describing terms and conditions attached to its use. Digging through some MSDN forums seems to indicate that it is free for commercial use, and that each application is limited to 50 requests per minute, which seems suitable for all but the most chatty meetings in SL. Exceeding the limit results in a two minute time-out, after which service resumes without penalty.
The Google Translate tools have certainly been useful. Not 100% reliable, but SL has residents from Korea and Japan–I can’t even guess at what a word can mean when the script is so different.
But every so often I’m at some event and some dumb broad starts spamming local chat with gestures: multiple-line ASCII art and weird sounds. (The worst example I know of is a dumb broad, pumping out 30 or 40 lines of chat, and ejecting from the parcel anyone who complains, but no names.)
Anyway, I wonder what that sort of apparent line noise does to the translator. I know it gives up somewhere between Shakespeare and Chaucer, and goes completely gaga on “Wheear ‘ast tha bin sin’ ah saw thee?”
How ’bout this. Translation service is only possible for Premium members and LL pays $0.10 a month for each customer to Google without an increase in Membership fees.
I, for one, am happy that this “service” closes: while I don’t care much about the viewer-side translation (since it only spams the user of the viewer who activates it), I do care about the damned spammy translation HUDs that ruin every true role-player’s experience ! Worst, the translations were so poor and approximate that they most of the time lead, at best to non-senses, and at worst to counter-senses.
Good riddance !
Most (I think) can be configured to do the work ‘properly’. e.g. I type in English on channel.x, the open Chat comes out in Language.
I have seen some spammy translator huds. I would regard seeing both the original and translation coming out in Chat as being very annoying in an RP environment.
I have seen huds that broadcast translations of what they are ‘hearing’. That’s a complete pain – on gesture WOOT level.
*evil thought* Maybe the freebie translation APIs could insert advertising into the translated output
So… as an itinerant Panther in a Spanish-speaking tribe, I would hear a sister shout “We are being attacked by single-breasted uniform jackets ** Eat at Joe’s – Yummy **”
“single-breasted uniform jackets” ?? Yes. seriously – there are a lot of them , armed and dangerous, in Hispanic Gor – disguised as Mercs.
I first retweeted about this and had thought to myself, “Oh no! A barrier to communication!” After having read through your post and follow up comments, I feel inclined to go with the arguments given by Vick Forcella and Henri Beauchamp. The spamming from translation HUDs is as ugly as sin and if a compensation were to be granted, it should come by a premium service option with native support of the viewer(s) themselves.
I’ve found the translation feature rather useful on many occasions just to get the gist of what some ones trying to say. But it’s hardly efficient, it tries to translate what I say to myself, and my friends who speak English it translates them just cos they spelt a word wrong.
There is alot of ways LL could reduce the translation demand by making the feature more efficient. Selective avatar translation
I also found translation service invaluable when dealing with customers. I think Google is being too cheap. This is one of the free services for developers that they’re closing. The app engine is also getting serious limits for free apps. It’s not like they’re in financial need. Losing the goodwill of developers is something that doesn’t show directly on the bottom line but might hurt them in the future.
Well, we don’t know how much Google is losing per day on this. Enough that they’re clearly unwilling to continue to subsidise it from other operations – and considering how well their other operations are doing, I’d tentatively guess that they’re losing a lot on the service each day.
I think you’re right about the “permanently on” thing… I addition to individual use, I’ve been to sims where there’s a translation device sitting in the corner, always on.
Even when the translations aren’t great, at least they make some rudimentary conversation possible, especially for Asian languages, where it’s nearly impossible for uneducated Westerner to guess at meaning.
Hm, so either this will lead to cascade mass exctinction of free translator services or the evolution towards one that can handle the load somehow, or a result midway between both.
Hm, how big and CPU intensive is a full fledged translator prog? Are there any free opensource good ones avaiable out there? Perhaps a solution to the issue would be shifting the focus from using things from big companies’ serves into using programs running locally on each person’s machines…
Btw, would it be possible to interface with the page translate thing and translate dynamicly generated page either hosted by lsl scripts or even on a barebones webserver running alongside or builtin the client?
Since I run a commercial SL translation service (offline translation of static texts, that is), I have kept an eye on the translator HUD’s for many years. There are some rather simple HUD’s, but also highly sophisticated HUD’s like the Q-Translator, which does use various channels and does a spellcheck BEFORE translation – which significantly increases the quality.
The market for the HUD’s was rather small, until about 2-3 years ago a new player arrived and started a personal crusade against the translator HUD’s. He felt that – since they were all commercial – they violated the Google API. So he made his own translator and threw it on the market for free, and he pumped tons of advertising money into it. His own translator HUD was rather substandard, loaded with features which copied the features of other HUD’s, but essentially did not work. What he never understood was that the other HUD’s did not charge for the Google service, but for the features they added additionally. But effectively he managed to kill the market, kill innovation, and saturated the market with his substandard spammy HUD.
So, yes, what the previous commenters complained about was most likely this HUD, and who knows, maybe it was even part in Google’s decision.
I hope the creators of the leading translation HUD’s take this as an opportunity to switch to a new service, and reinvigorate their products.
I’ve done hour-long conversations with folks from other countries (most recently, Italian) using Google translate. I’ve used both huds, and the website itself (I’ve got two monitors, so it’s easy to copy-and-paste).
A hud is convenient, but if there are several people in the conversation it can get very difficult to use. Copying-and-pasting from the Google translate website is a pain, but doable.
Unfortunate.
I doubt Second Life was so significant an impact that if it weren’t for the translator scripts the Translator API would still be viable, because Google would probably just have blacklisted all the simulator addresses or forced Linden Lab into some kind of pay agreement for API calls coming from simulator software.
Not sure how prevalent the need of a translator API is for Second Life, but it sounds fairly important. Maybe the Lab if it has some spare bucks should search for an official third-party solution to integrate into the viewer akin to the TPVs that integrated with Google’s translator API. I can’t imagine it’d cost Linden Lab nearly as much as Vivox does, but who knows.
I know we used various HUDs at Oxbridge with a variety of results. We have a lot of Portugese speakers from Brazil who visit and HUDs have varying degrees of success translating. With the many and varied visitors we got, our helpful volunteers did actually come up with some notecards with handy phrases that could be copied and pasted:
Follow the red arrows for the tutorial
No shooting
Please put your clothes back on
Please remove the freenis…etc.
(only half joking)
We also had some notecards with LMs to newcomers areas for various languages. I know a lot of those are no longer current.
And even though I am not a roleplayer, spammy gestures and translators are quite annoying. I have no problem asking people politely (first time) to can them. The mute button is my good friend at events as well.
I think that some kind of built in translation function (even if crippled) would be of much more essential value for the multinational SL culture than visual gimmicks.