Basically this proposed Wormkit module would translate pre-game lobby and in-game chat on the fly. I don't think I've seen it suggested anywhere. Would it be hard to make? Yandex Translate has a free API for small projects like this.
Chat text is already written to the replay and chat log in real-time as it happens. The translator module could easily extract that chat, and translate each line on Yandex.
To address possible inefficiencies, the module could communicate with itself on a very basic level. The module should detect if more than one player has the translation module, and designate one player to be the translator for that game. The designated translator will be told (or detect) each player's specified native language(s), and whisper them translations on the fly. That way, in a game with 5 English players and one Russian, those 5 players won't be all hammering the Yandex service at once for the same translation.
There could be a predefined list of common words/terms, so things like "ns" and "lol" didn't get sent to Yandex, and the translation was just pulled from a database.
Bilingual players could specify more than one language, to opt out of receiving unnecessary translations. You could toggle whether to see translations for things you say or not. You could choose to disable translation for certain players, similar to the mute function.
We don't have Unicode support yet for Asian players, but at least all the Russian, Portuguese, Polish, etc players would finally be able to understand each other. Since players would (by necessity) see both the original and the translated text, this module would actually help people learn other languages. It would be great to be able to communicate more effectively with people, and would really help keep WA alive IMO.
I'd be surprised if the required code for a lot of this isn't already available as open-source somewhere. If not, anyone who decided to code this would be able to reuse the main parts for other projects. It'd make a good "learner" project for a new programmer too.
