A lot of Second Life users are wondering about a strange message that their viewer is spitting out with distressing regularity. The message generally looks like this: Translation failed: the parameter ‘appId’ must contain at least ’16’ characters Parameter name: appId

What’s happening is that – as you might recall – Google’s transitioned its translation API from a free service to a paid service. The mystifying message spits out every time your Second Life viewer tries to translate some text into your language. The new viewer defaults to Bing, and that’s the service that is generating the error – it’s complaining that you haven’t provided an appId for the translation service.

Making the message actually go away, though, is actually simple enough.

In a late-model viewer, go to the Me menu, and select Preferences (or just hit control-P).

Then select the Chat section of preferences, and then Chat Translation Settings, near the bottom of the preferences window. Here’s a picture, because despite the size of the button it is actually kind of hard to spot, even when you’re actively looking for it:

Once you’re there, uncheck Enable machine translation while chatting, and the message should go away. If you do have a Bing appID or a Google API Key, you can enter them here, though you’ll be billed by Microsoft/Google respectively for any translation charges that you accrue.

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Tags: Bing, Google, Microsoft, Second Life, Translation, Virtual Environments and Virtual Worlds