Second Life Free Language Translator

IMPORTANT – READ:Second Life: Update on Metanomics Translator

A couple of years back Google decided to charge for its translator service. Many of the translators in use in Second Life were dependent on Google’s service.  Those translators failed.

Babelfish

Babelfish by –Tico–, on Flickr

Do you remember the Bablefish translator? That was my translator until Google changed the API.

Soon other translation services followed Google’s lead. One must now have an account of some kind to use those services in a Second Life app… or any app. 

To make it easier to use these paid services, Linden Lab built in support for the Bing ad Google translation services. You can find the settings in: Preferences->Chat->Translation… (button).

Google has a free trial of their service. They also have a Pricing Calculator. In the free trial you can use up to US$300 of service over 60 days. Then you’re on a pay as you go service.

The cost is basically $20 per 1 million characters of text. The basic service is limited to 2 million characters/day.

To get an idea of what that means for a Second Life user, I looked at my chat logs. My chat log starting in 2013/07/15 and running to 2015/03/02 runs about 2,080 pages or 110,000 lines or 855,000 words or 4.9 million characters. If I subtract out all the characters used for time stamps (20char/line), that reduces the count by 2,216,840 characters. This means the viewer would have sent 2,747,612 characters to Google for translation, worst case if I left it on ALL the time. That would put my cost under US$30 and that is for 1 year and 8 months ±.

I suspect the actual cost would have been around $10 or less for a 20 month period. That is like $0.50 per month. Certainly not cost prohibitive.

Free Translator

But, this is Second Life and free is good. An advantage SL has over RL is free stuff in-world is often pretty damn good. In the case I would mark it excellent.

While I thought all the free translators were gone, there is a free translator out there. I met an Italian using it. Metanomics Translator v2.1 is the name. If you go to the Market Place you will find four different sellers of the translator. Price: L$50, L$25, L$15, and L$0. As best I can tell they are all 4 the same device. My in-world version, given to me by the cute Italian, shows the creator as: Discord Schism (2008). You may notice that Discord is not selling the translator in the Market Place. I have no idea why.

There is a store in-world, Schism Productions (SLURL). But, I didn’t find a translator there. So, I’m guessing the only source is the Market Place. The free copy is here (Web URL).

6 thoughts on “Second Life Free Language Translator

  1. Hi Nalates,
    so far i remember, Discord Schism don’t want that his translator is shared any longer, since he got bombed with support requests (there were comments from Mr Schism in the product reviews of the copied translators offered on the Marketplace). Thats why we stopped sharing it at Caledon Oxbridge about a year ago – just out of respect to Mr Schism. It might be OK to use it, if someone has it already in his inventory.
    It was reported, that this translator don’t work in all regions anymore, but I have not used it in other regions than Oxbridge.
    Sincerely yours
    Ravelli Ormstein

  2. p.s.: Here is one of Mr Schism’s comment I’ve meant: https://marketplace.secondlife.com/de-DE/p/Freebie-Translator/3614858?page=2

  3. Translators are largely useless and dangerous:

    Useless because they will invariably make non-senses and counter-senses while translating, or even will plainly fail to translate full chunks of text (especially when they are full of typos), causing more misunderstanding than anything else.

    Dangerous because they cause your prose to travel one more route to through the Net and reach a third party’s server; and this also includes the prose of all people within chat distance around your avatar !

    Do you really want Google (or any other Big-Brother-esque company) to collect your prose, archive it, analyze it ?… What about people around you: did they agree to see their prose routed out of SL by your viewer or translator HUD ?…

  4. Pingback: Second Life: Update on Metanomics Translator | Nalates' Things & Stuff

  5. Pingback: Second Life: Metanomics Translator Failing | Nalates' Things & Stuff

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