Automatic Translation

Automatic translation is a tool that automatically collects and translates strings in your experience. This tool is available on any experience and allows you to immediately begin displaying translated strings in your experience and broadening your potential audience.

How Automatic Translation Works

Automatic translation works by first collecting strings encountered within the experience, either through testing or playing. Once these strings are captured, Roblox automatically translates the strings on your experience's localization table.

After collecting these strings, you can enable translations for your experience to automatically display the captured strings for users who have their default language settings set to the translated language.

Automatic translation only provides automated translations for blank entries on the localization table and doesn't override any existing translations, including any custom translations made by a developer or translator. For example, if you manually clear a translation for an entry, the tool assumes that you don't want to translate that entry.

Enable Automatic Text Capture

Automatic Text Capture (ATC) captures text strings from UI elements in your experience and adds them to your translation table. Once added, you can enable translations per language and Roblox's automatic translation will generate translated text on those captured strings.

You can enable automatic string capture with the following steps:

  1. In localization settings, navigate to Settings.

  2. Enable Capture text from experience UI while users play.

ATC adds text strings to the localization table within 1-2 minutes of encountering the text in the experience. If you do not want ATC to collect a certain text string, such as a name or unique text entry, disable the AutoLocalize property of the text object.

Daily Updates

ATC also checks your experience on a daily basis for new strings and strings that no longer exist, such as usernames or strings related to a past event. The tool updates the localization table and adds or removes entries accordingly. The ATC only removes auto-scraped strings with automatic translations and ignores strings that were manually added or that have manual translations.

If you do not want ATC to perform daily updates, navigate to your localization settings and disable the second ATC toggle:

Enabling Translations

Once strings are captured to your localization table, follow these steps to enable translated content:

  1. In your experience's localization page, navigate to Settings.

  2. Enable Use Translated Content.

  3. Navigate to the Languages tab.

  4. Enable any supported languages for automatic translations.

    • Experience Information refers to the name and description of your experience.
    • Experience Strings & Products refers to the text that appears within your experience.

Automatic Translation Updates

As the automatic translation tool improves, more accurate translations may become available for existing strings. When these updates become available, Roblox refreshes any automatic translations. Automatic translation updates will appear in your translation history.

A translation history log displays at the bottom of each translation entry.

If you have a specific translation that you want to remain unchanged, you can lock the entry to ensure it will not be impacted by any updates.

A 'Lock translation from automatic updates' toggle is accessible below the translation entry field in each translation entry.

By default, manually added strings and strings with manual translations are locked. If you unlock an entry, it will be impacted by both automatic translation updates and ATC if it is enabled. If you want to generate a new automatic translation for a previously changed or cleared translation, unlock the entry.

Supported Languages

Roblox supports automatic translation between the languages listed below. Currently, Roblox Translate will always assume that source strings are in the experience source language.

Currently Supported Languages for Automatic Translation
Chinese - Simplified
Chinese - Traditional
English
French
German
Indonesian
Italian
Japanese
Korean
Portuguese
Russian
Spanish
Thai
Turkish
Polish
Vietnamese