Replace the Auto-translate function

Don't get me wrong, I'm a HUGE fan of the Auto-Translate function. It was seminal in facilitating cross-continent play and led to a whole pigeon-language in itself.

There has always been and will always be folk who communicate in the easiest language for them to express themselves without using the auto-translate, which is great and perfectly normal.

However, it's 2023, and for a few years now we've had the ability to live-translate and overwrite languages that are not our own via our phone's cameras. I played Final Fantasy Grandmasters this way in 2016, and it was a bit of a chore, but certainly doable.

We are at a point where a really low-impact language translation AI can act in real time to present player dialogue in a language selected in the UI. I'm not talking about game language being displayed this way (all the sentences the game prints for us are hard-coded to the zone you read them in, so I appreciate that it's a different system), but certainly something server-side that intercepts player speech.

Perhaps even the same system can be implemented for XIV.

We already had more sophistcated technology when the game came out. The auto translate was created because it was *fast.* neither the server nor the client really had to do much of any work as it's just a look up table with 4 (well now two) entries for each translation item. And perhaps more importantly, when using only set phrases, you can ensure the translation is far more accurate. While google translate has gotten better over time, it's still far from perfect, and that's less a fault of the technology and more the fault of the nuance of language- literal translation loses the meaning but the meaning of a statement isn't always concrete in every language.

While the tech has gotten way better I still don't think it's the best idea because mistranslations (which are still common) can cause unintended friction.