Club Penguin Chat Update Coming In 2013: More Phrases + Translating

While I first posted about this feature back in October 2011, I figured I would post this new article published by The Telegraph early this morning. It states ‘British children will soon be able to chat online in Spanish, French, Portuguese and German without knowing a word of any of those languages, as part of an upgrade to Disney’s Club Penguin website’ however it’s anybody that goes on the game. The Telegraph is a United Kingdom website so it just says British.

To summarise up this article, sometime in 2013 or later this year if they get ahead of schedule Club Penguin will be upgrading their chat system yet again, just like they did last October with the word suggestions appearing as you type. There are currently 300,000 different phrases.

However, this update will multiply that number by 20,000. Yeah, six billion total combinations. Wow. Not only that, but the translation service that I mentioned above and talked about last year will be launched when this update is due next year – more on that below. When in a foreign language server, it’ll translate to whatever language you speak. How it knows which to translate it to, I don’t know. For all I know it might only support English to another language and vice versa, and not something such as German to French or Portuguese to Spanish.

It all started when Lane Merrifield, (Billybob) Club Penguin’s co-founder, said the team wondered “what would it be like to create a world where language barriers disappear?”. According to the article, they are still hard at work and everything will be available next year in 2013. Hopefully it’s sooner than that, but I can imagine why it’d be taking so long!