Currently, communities using the content localization feature can select multiple languages to show localized content. For example, a forum may have German, English, French set up in content localization supported locales.
Right now, users are only able to select one of the languages the forum supports.
If a topic has posts written in all three languages, Günter would see all those in German only despite being fluent in all three languages.
The goal of this feature topic is to allow such multilingual users to select multiple languages and see the posts written in their original word, instead of just one language. Another thing to be mindful of is that user.locale is currently being used to determine the language controls (buttons, labels, tooltips, etc), and that should be the user’s primary language.
Here are supporting quotes from largely the same few topics:
One UX question we’ll have to figure out is how to surface the option to the user. If we use the existing user.locale and allow an array e.g. ['en', 'ja', 'ko'], there are many other places that would be affected, as opposed to keeping user.locale to one and adding another user field altogether. If we add a new user field, we also have to think about location.
There is also the question of visitors who are not logged in. How do they know the content is translated, and how can they specify which languages they do not want translated or turn off translation entirely? The need is the same for logged in members and anonymous visitors.
Thanks @Moin for kindly linking to this thread, had missed it!
I second the need for this multi-language preference. Especially for logged-in users, but why not also for anonymous ones.
In Nordics and Europe, it’s so common for people to speak multiple languages, and currently the lack of this feature steers people to turn off the localisation. It’s not a bad thing per se, but would be nice to solve this when there’s more multilingual community and discussions.
I don’t have any ready solution on mind, but some thinking on top of @nat’s comments above: Could the language selector be more like checkbox settings, where you could select multiple languages you understand? There you also could mark (star) your main language, which would then be same as user.locale and affect the UI language?
I had a somewhat crazy idea. What if we were to have just the one button in the header, and have that open a big popup akin to the keyboard shortcuts popup? It would be shown to logged in and not logged in users.
That could give us plenty of space, all in one place, to:
explain that the site is automatically translated, how it works
provide a link to more information about automatic translation or to give feedback to site owners about it
allow the user to specify their preferred interface language
allow the user to see a big list of languages currently translated on the site, with tickboxes indicating which they want translated (default selected, with ability toggle them all on/off). The list could also indicate how many topics from that language have been translated.
I like this idea! This is much better than hiding preferred languages somewhere under profile settings. Additionally giving a chance to tweak the settings is better than the current one size fits all -model, where everything is either translated to one language or not.
As a site owner chance to provide more context, feedback link etc. would be cool too, but I think the biggest user need relates to the translation experience.
Partly related to my comment above, isn’t the “show original” selection global through different threads and shouldn’t reset? Currently some of our users would like to turn off the localisation fully for their account, but at least one commented that it had brought back on automatically
I think having a clear on/off toggle in Tobias’ envisioned pop-up would be the clearest way for people to manage their localisation preference
I don’t think this feature will be prioritised until early next year.
This is not a UI change, it will be quite an in-depth change to language preferences within logged-in user user profiles, and anons separately. Moving from one language to multiple language support properly is not going to be a quick change.
The “show original” button should be global per device. When your user makes the comment, it would be appreciated if they could record a video / multiple screenshots.
I think to cover this in interface settings, we can remove our existing setting “Show original content instead of translated content.” and replace it with a multiple choice section for “content language” (separate from “interface language”)
Other options would be “Do not translate any content” and if someone chooses “exclude some languages from translation” we can then show an input that allows languages to be added to the list of exclusions:
I think this would help solve the initial issue of avoiding translating all content for the people who want a selection. We can also consider more ways to surface this to make it more discoverable so it’s not only buried in user preferences, if needed.
It was much easier to discover and use the preference when there was a toggle button on the topic. Navigating to my preferences every time I get sick of reading (broken) German translations feels more complicated than clicking the button. I have to leave the topic and get back to it after changing my preferences.
And the toggle button also worked while I was not logged in. As a visitor reading the original now requires using the toggle button on every translated post.
Part of the reason for the removal of the whole-topic toggle is that some people were confused about its purpose when they clicked it without a translated post in view (“nothing happens”), and there were additional complaints about its always-visible prominence.
I think we can reconsider the who topic toggle if it’s more useful, but we should reconsider the design and maybe add more feedback about what the toggle does. Reddit’s toggle is clearer because it always shows supporting text explaining what it does.
I know about the new toggle button. But it means that on a topic with 10 posts, I now need 10 clicks to see all posts in the language they were written in. Before, it was one.
When I am logged in, the alternative is to click my avatar (1), the user icon (2), preferences (3), interface (4), the checkbox (5), save (6), refresh (7), and navigate back to where I was reading (x) - that’s almost the same number of clicks. But when there is a post in French or Chinese, there’s no button I can use to quickly turn on translations, so I have to repeat all these steps once before and once after I’ve read the post.
When you disable the preference because, in general, you prefer not to read translations, the toggle button in your screenshot is not available.
Since I don’t understand all languages users use to post on Meta, disabling the preference is not a real option. But at the same time, it’s the only option to see the topic list on latest in the language the topic was written in, instead of translations.
The timeline toggle button worked for all these cases: seeing posts in their original language by default as a visitor, switching the whole topic to translated/untranslated, and switching the topic list to translated/untranslated. It was easy to access. Now I visit my preferences multiple times to adjust the setting to my current needs. There is a menu in the sidebar where you can change your theme, but none for translations. I don’t switch my theme multiple times a day, but I used the timeline translation toggle multiple times a day.
Also, the new button does two things at once: it shows the language the post was written in and displays the original. So if the info says “Chinese,” I need to click it again right away because I don’t understand it and the original isn’t helpful. (There’s no hover option on the tablet, so clicking is my only option to see the language information, but then I also already get the original)
I just noticed a dot at the end of the translated title of my post and wanted to check whether I had added that to the original or if it was an addition by the AI translator. The problem: While there is a toggle on my post, there is no toggle for the title.
I know this is a little off-topic here, but it’s an addition to my post above explaining situations where the toggle in the preference is more complicated than the toggle within the topic. And since edits no longer bump the topic, the suggestion is to write an additional post instead
