chat_exporter / monitor / translator

Too long to read

These software enable you to play on your favourite Luanti servers in your language:

• chat and channel messages received are translated in the language that you choose
• chat, channel and private messages sent can be translated in the server, channel or target user language.

What's in it?

chat_exporter is a Luanti client-side mod:

• enabling the continuous export of chat or channel messages into Luanti's debug.txt file as it's not directly possible to copy/paste them from the game
• adding 3 local commands:
  • ".tr LANG MESSAGE" for requesting the translation of a MESSAGE in the LANG language,
  • ".lang LANG" to define the language in which you want your translations. It's initialized from your Luanti locale confguration, saved to disk after each modification and reloaded automatically afterwards.
  • ".slang LANG" to define the server language. It's saved to disk after each modification and reloaded automatically afterwards.
• These LANG parameters are mostly 2 letters code from the ISO 639-1 standard, or in rare cases things like "zh-CN" (for simplified chinese) depending on the translator used.

chat_monitor and chat_translator_XXX are Python command-line scripts (use one or the other) opening a secondary window:

• the first one automatically extracts chat_exporter lines (prefixed with the "§" character) from the debug.txt file and lets you copy/paste them into your favourite translation tool. If you are a developer, it's also a stub you can adapt in order to use other translation API.
• the second one adds automatic translation:
  • of messages received from other players,
  • or messages you requested a translation for. On Windows operating systems, this translation is automatically copied into the clipboard for direct paste in Luanti's chat (it works only in this direction).
• These translations are made in your default "locale" language or the one you selected with the ".lang" command, or the one saved from a previous session.

There was at least one server-side mod doing this kind of things, but the idea here was to be able to do it on any server and allow gamers from many countries to play together even with no common language!

An example with chat_translator_deeptranslator

Here you will see:

• a first line telling you if the automatic clipboard loading works (Windows) or not (Unix)
• in this peculiar example, the languages available for translations (depends on the translation API used)
  • Here I use the the deep-translator translation API, with the Google Translate backend
• a reminder that you can exit this secondary window with the Control-C key combination
• a line indicating the player name and his saved or default target language which is written when the player's connect
• then the chat and channel messages in Luanti's format ("channel name message text") along with their translation or an error message
  • the translator can fail if you select an unavailable or non existing language code, as shown here with the "jp" (japan) code instead of "ja" (japanese)
  • or in case of network issues if you use an online translator (for example with filtering proxies or excessive requests)
  • etc.
• translation requests are displayed in the "translation" pseudo-channel.
• the second line indicating the player name and his new target language is caused by the usage of the ".lang it" command.

Privacy notice:

• In this case translations are done on Google servers. They only receive the message body, not the sender game ID.
• The triplets channel/sender/message are stored in the debug.txt file until it is removed by the player or overwritten by Luanti because of excessive size.

Installation

1. Manually download the latest release of this mod (as client-side mods download is not handled yet through Luanti's User Interface)

2. Follow general instructions on client-side mods installation:

   • Put the following line in luanti/minetest.conf to enable client-side mods (if not already done):

     enable_client_modding = true
     

   • Unpack the mod archive in luanti/clientmods

   • Rename the mod directory to luanti/clientmods/chat_exporter

   • Put the following line in luanti/clientmods/mods.conf:

     load_mod_chat_exporter = true
     

3. Copy the Python scripts from tools to your luanti directory, where the debug.txt file is located.

   1. If it's not already done, install Python to run them
   2. And run the following command from a console (Terminal or PowerShell on Windows) to install or update their dependencies:

      pip install -U clipboard colorama deep_translator

Note: If you haven't upgraded yet to luanti 5.10.0 or newer, your luanti directory will be called minetest...

Usage

Launch Luanti and the chosen script, preferably in this order (otherwise you'll get the translation of your previous gaming session).

It's of course better if you have 2 or more screens, one for the game, on for the translated chat, one for your server map... 😃

Possible future directions

Ongoing:

• v1.3: Add commands for direct translation of messages sent by the user: chat messages in the server language, channel messages in the channel language, private message in the destination player language. With memorization of these languages from one gaming sessions to the other.
• v2.0: Automatically intercept messages sent by the user and translate them in the server language.

Maybe adding a translation cache, along with common gaming abbreviations (ty, wb, brb, etc.).

Other translation scripts would be welcome, especially some with offline processing (for example, using things like LibreTranslate or Argos Translate in local setup, once their installation procedure are repaired). Other developers are also welcome to submit or tell me about alternative translators for inclusion in tools or reference on this page.

I could also provide Python packages for the chat_translation Python scripts in order to automatically handle their dependencies on third-parties packages.

When I'll be done with my client-side mods development list, I'll probably group them in a "comfort" modpack.

For those with extreme privacy sensibility, it would be possible to provide a configurable option to announce in the chat the start/stop of chat recording by a player, though I would find this bothersome...

Go to Discussions if you want to suggest other things...

One last word

This open source software is free for any use. If you like it, I would gladly appreciate a GitHub ⭐