Language Translation Tech in MMOGs

Thallius

The title says it. How useful would it be to be able to talk to people you are playing an MMOG with all over the world who use several different languages? Would the cost be worth it? How many and what people would take advantage of the tech? I understand that this would be easiest and cheapest to impliment in a text based system but at least that is a start. Many more people from outside the US play MMOGs than we do here and it would open up alot more fun opportunities if we could talk to the ones that don't know English. Such a feature would also open up opportunities for many more subscribers and revenue for the publishers and developers.

In my early EQ days I played on the Veeshan server and it had alot of Japanese players and quite a few Germans as well. I bought a Japanese to English and a German to English translation book and did my best to memorize many of the common words and phrases and they did make communicating a little easier. I remember that many US players avoided the Japanese and some were even mean to them and perhaps the language barrier played a part in that. Remove this barrier and you create a tighter and better community.

Axehilt

Didn't Phantasy Star Online have translation?  I seem to recall chat in that game being a sort of "select a bunch of words and combine them" system (and because the words were pre-defined, they could be auto-translated to whoever you were chatting to.)

Honestly I don't see why there isn't a Translation API out there which auto-translates text chat to your selected language.  At the very least a grammar-agnostic version has to exist out there somewhere.

Jimmy_Scythe

Kio?

Vi ne parolas Esperanton?

La lingvo estas tre facila lerni, kaj amusa.

(go to truduku.net for a translation of what I just wrote)

Seriously, just go learn another language if you want to play with people who don't speak English. Servers are usually seperated by region anyway, so you really only need to know the languages spoken in your particular region. Here in America, people speak English and Spanish. In Canada they speak English and French. South American countries speak either Spanish or Portuguese.

Given, there are some games with genuinely international communities. Eve online and Final Fantasy XI at launch come directly to mind. But unless you're willing to put up with the massive lag of a server in another hemisphere of the globe, the language barrier isn't that big of a deal.