Second Life: Metanomics Translator Failing

I have seen a couple of posts in the SL Forum about the Metanomics translator giving a script error and not translating. I decided to try mine.

~Carolina Bertolline~

~Carolina Bertolline~ by Luaflor Moo, on Flickr

I don’t get an error with my copy of the Metanomics translator. I get a bunch of garbage in the chat window. It is definitely having a problem with the Second Life 3.7.27 (300424)  viewer. 

I have recently been writing about translators in Second Life:

If this is a fatal break, we are screwed. See BUG-8794* – The Bing API used by the viewer is depreciated. The same is true for Google’s translation API. It has changed and the viewer no longer works with it. It hasn’t since May 2012. But, old API keys already setup continued to work. If you have run into the problem, click over to the JIRA and add your information.

Note I said INFORMATION. Don’t post ‘me too’. If you are doing a ‘me too’ then click Watch.

It is spring and I’ve seen where Google is doing another housekeeping sweep and closing little used services. They do that every so often. That may be what is causing the Metanomics failure.

*Due to a bug in the SL JIRA and Forum login process you may have to log into the JIRA before this link will work.

UPDATE: I’ve had one user of IOL Q-Translator 57 Languages tell me it is also not working. I can’t confirm that. 2nd Update: Another user advises me Q-Translator is working (4/10). Reviews dated April 2015 say it has to be reset every few minutes. I have not tried it.

UPDATE: MH Translator L$395 (English), this still seems to work. I can confirm the demo in in the in-world shop works. It comes in versions. Apparently the versions only have to do with the User Interface language. Demo here. (SLURL) 2nd Update: This one has had no reviews since Dec 2014, which said it didn’t work. I tested it 4/8/15 and the demo worked.

3rd Update: A new free translator is out by Hinaichigo Xaris. You can find it in the marketplace here. I have a copy. It has no UI. It uses chat commands to change language. Plus you have to know the Google language codes to set a language. But, it does have auto-detect. It weights 1-script @ 70k. The script is no copy, no mod, so I can’t see what it is doing. Since there is no user ID code, I expect this translator to fail at some point. But, for now it seems to work.

10 thoughts on “Second Life: Metanomics Translator Failing

  1. Well I don’t know which engine the Metanomics translator uses, but last week during a conversation with an Italian who was using it, I noticed that it makes odd translations.
    I used to say “Google translation will start a war some day” but I had to keep it open in a window to make sense of what my partner was actually saying.
    Both Metanomics and Google provide awful translations into Dutch by the way.

  2. Both Universal and Metanomic translator are not working. The problems look similar. HUD translator is useful to many because Linden Lab translation function is one-way only. (usual LL half-ass implementation style!!) I wish they have a HUD version where people can use their own API key and pay for the costs themselves. No free lunch is ok, just give people options.

    • It should be possible to write from Metanomics code a translator using the new Bing and Google API’s. The code is public in the wiki.

      But, it would be better if the Lab repaired the viewer version of the translator and we could avoid running HUD scripts that load the region servers.

      I’m not sure why you think think their implementation was half-assed. A couple of those I know that used it, thought it was OK. Plus the new API’s will do language detection. So, new translators should be able to handle more than one language at a time.

      • The Lab’s version has two support two-way translation like the HUD version. Right now, it is one way, I can have everyone saying different language translate back to English for me, but not automatically translate English back to the language whoever says to me. HUD’s version has it both way, the Lab’s version has it one way, therefore half-assed, like many things the lab does.

        • No… having a translator translate to and speak all the languages of people around you would throw a massive load on the chat servers. They are already having load problems.

  3. it is very strange, my avatar has problems with the Metanomic translator
    on 2 different PC systems but 2 other avatars don’t have any troubles with
    the translator at all, on the same PC systems with Firestorm viewers.

    I receive messages with scripts errors and I can see a text “doctype html public..”
    on the translator HUD where I normally can see the name of the languages.
    I have spoke somebody in SL who use the Singularity Viewer and she had the
    same problems.

  4. Pingback: Second Life: Free Language Translator | Nalates' Things & Stuff

  5. They always have load problems, HUD version does translation in both ways. After all, it should just pass things back-n-forth to Google API, why should there be load problems? Anyway, found \Multi language Translator\, Fluffy Park 117, 36, 22 – this one works! Just want to share with your readership. ^^

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