After a long absence, I returned to Thrive and wanted to contribute to its translation.
However, in the process of translating, I found some issues that greatly affected the experience (it did not affect normal use).
For example, the following example. I will not change the translation of the entry so that the maintainers can check for problems.) :
In this image, the top input box is the original English string. In the middle is a sentence in simplified Chinese that Weblate automatically generates (I don’t know what it’s based on or how it came to be), and at the bottom is the sentence that I re-translated from simplified Chinese back to English using a translation tool.
I don’t know if Weblate is being used for the purpose of using automatic translation for quick translation. I would also appreciate if the developers could answer this.
Thanks!
On a code technical level we use gettext for translations. The way gettext handles new pieces of text that have no translation already is that it “guesses” a text that might be suitable. It picks from existing text in the game, which is the reason why the automatically added text guesses are basically always wrong, but the tool automatically works like that so it would be a bit annoying to require people adding new text to manually remove those guesses. That’s why those kind of not at all correct translations appear on the Weblate website but always marked as needing changes.
Thank you very much for your answer! I have understood the situation. However, I would still like to inquire if it is possible to integrate some translation service APIs to enable automatic translation, which can assist contributors in translating more quickly? If so, that would be wonderful!
Weblate does seem to support some automatic translation tools, but based on my experience all of the translation tools are not correct and consistent all of the time so they anyway require a human translator to check everything. Also integrating them to the Thrive translations website officially probably costs money. Individual translators can use such tools by themselves to help them translate faster if they feel like it helps. I would guess that if some translators use such a tool there would be issues with text tone with some translations having an “AI feel” to them and other text sounding much more natural.
