자동 AI 번역에 대한 생각

기여 사이트 피드백
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1

EDIT: This topic started as a kind of a feature request that would let me, as an author, have more control over how my contributions (posts) are handled. It resulted in a much deeper thinking about how content AI translation could end up and if it is meaningful and possible at all in a context of this forum (and similar). Follows my original post:

I want to continue on what I realized when discussing the pitfalls of automatic translations. Most of the discussion was about how the Discourse Admin can set up the site so it translates (or doesn’t) nicely and when it does, how should the users be informed on what they read (what is the original language, if it is a translation etc.).

But I have another point of view:

There was an argument that proxies do some translation in order to bring traffic:

But I want to talk about the source of information, meaning when you finally get to the post the author wrote, what will you see?

So let’s take Meta as an example and have a look from these different points of view and aims:

  • Site owner (CDCK): We want to talk to as many people as possible, so we turn on AI localization
  • Reader: I want to read easily everything in the languages I am confident with (my mother language and whatever others I learned I want to read the originals, otherwise auto-translate into my mother language)
  • Writer: Now there are two options
    A) I write in any language and I am fine with you translating it to anything you want
    B) I am very careful on what I write and how I write it in the language I have chosen (here on Meta it would be English as the original forum’s master language) and I want to opt out from automatic translations that you offer.

So B is my point. Me as a contributor, I want to have some control over what you do here with my contributions, no matter how you imagine the forum to work. I am fine that some people will not be able to understand what I say. If I write English I may expect people also learn English in order to understand me—I had to learn English myself in the first place. And I don’t want to be misunderstood just for the sake of being heard by as many people as possible.

So this feature is about the author to be able to control the level of translation of their posts.

And if you would imagine implementing it, of course it can get more complicated—if I speak multiple languages I may go as far as localizing my post manually. Not likely, but in theory, yes.

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Multilingual user feedback on Automatic Translations
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That is… something. Are you really demanding that from every living person in the Earth, just because you’ve learned English :flushed_face:

Sure. It could be done. Then every posts where author says what a reader must can, should be hidden from every single translated topics. Because that would then be just fair.

This will be interesting world when every italian, spanish speaking, portugese, russians, chinese, vietnamise… will follow your idea.

1개의 좋아요
3

Are we discussing the technical and philosophical aspects of translations or each other’s taste and life experience here?

1개의 좋아요
4

Why do you think those are un-related? You just told why you want to get something using very philosophical reason and now some reason is not suitable?

I really dislike double standards. But it is not your place to say what I can or cannot do. You make your choise to write or not, nothing more.

I’m off.

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It will be a very sad world if people stop trying to learn each other’s language. A global war in less than 5 years. Even without AI being evil. And I am being optimistic here.

6

Exactly and this post is all about my choice and CDCK’s choice to let me in or not.

1개의 좋아요
7

피드백에 감사하지만, 저자의 관점에 동의하지 않는다는 이유만으로 주제에 반응하는 것은 커뮤니티 규칙에 위배될 수도 있다고 생각합니다. 저는 사용하지 않는 Discourse 기능이 많고, 그것 하나하나에 대해 발표하지도 않으며, 더군다나 저자에게 그 기능이 얼마나 멍청한지 말하지도 않습니다.

저자로서 자신을 어떻게 표현하는지에 대해 신경 쓰지 않는다면, 저는 전혀 문제없습니다. 저는 그렇지 않고, 제가 틀린 사람이라는 말을 듣기 위해 여기 온 것도 아닙니다. 그리고 이 포럼의 목표가 그런 것도 아니라고 생각합니다. 다만, 그것이 이루어지지 않을 것이라거나 제 문제에 대한 다른 해결책이 있다는 것을 듣고, 문명적이고 건설적인 토론을 하는 것은 전혀 괜찮습니다. 감사합니다.

그리고 질문에 대한 답변입니다: 제가 모든 사람에게 영어를 배울 것을 요구하나요? 아니요. 제가 쓴 것을 모든 사람이 읽을 필요는 없습니다. 하지만 만약 읽는다면, 저는 오직 원문만 보고 싶어 합니다. 그리고 번역을 보고 싶다면, 스스로 도구를 사용해 번역할 때 그것이 번역임을 인식하게 하고 싶습니다. 그래서 그것이 완벽하지 않다는 것을 알 수 있도록요. 저는 AI 자동 번역이 구현되어 사용될 경우, 사람들이 원문을 연구하는 것을 게을리 할까 두렵습니다. 그리고 제가 이해하는 언어로 저에게 답장하는 것도 게을리 할까 봐요. 저는 이 사이트의 저자로서 그로부터 옵트아웃하고 싶습니다. 저는 전 세계의 영어권 커뮤니티에 매우 만족하고 있었고, 우리가 각자의 언어로 말하면서 AI 자동 번역에 의존하게 되면 콘텐츠가 열화될 것이라는 강한 직감이 있습니다. 매우 기술적인 주제보다는, 이 주제와 같은 더 깊은 주제에서 분명히 그럴 것입니다.

저는 자동 번역이 #support나 #contribute:bug와 같은 카테고리에는 활성화되어야 하지만, #contribute:feature나 #contribute:site-feedback와 같은 더 깊은 카테고리에는 신중하게 고려되어야 한다고 생각합니다. 또한 #documentation이나 #wiki에서는 활성화하되 수동으로 편집되어야 합니다. 그렇지 않으면 독자로서도 콘텐츠 품질에 대해 걱정하기 시작할 수 있습니다.

기본적으로 Discourse는 100% 초고품질 UGC(User Generated Content)라는 사업에서 Semi-AIGC로 전환되었습니다**(한 게시물은 UGC인 원문이지만, 모든 번역은 기본적으로 AI가 생성한 것입니다. 모두가 정확하기를 기대하지만, 여전히 완전히 AI가 생성한 것이며, 아무도 무언가가 잘못되지 않았는지 확인하기 위해 모든 것을 읽지 않습니다). 그리고 사람들이 AIGC에 반응하기 시작하면, 매우 혼란스러워질 수 있습니다.

큰 변화입니다.

그리고 제 질문은 이렇습니다: 저는 그것의 일부가 되고 싶나요? 아니면 최소한 거리를 둘 수 있는 옵션을 갖고 싶나요?

6개의 좋아요
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This is a good topic, I agree having writing being automatically translated without that being clear to readers can be a problem. Annother possible solution is there being an alert banner to notify readers what the original language is they are reading and what system was used to translate that.

English is one of the most bizzare languages that has ever existed, wherin a few minor alterations to sentence structure or grammer can drastically change the meaning of a sentence or way readers may interpret that.

1개의 좋아요
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Now when you say it like this, maybe it would not even solve my problem.

Let’s say I am English speaking (but not native). Now we have a topic that goes like this:

  1. Master Topic: SomeLanguage
  2. Response: EnglishLanguage
  3. Response: SomeLanguage
  4. Response: TotallyDifferentLanguage

Everything gets translated into English but only the 1st response is actually from an English speaker.

Now what language is this thread in? No warnings will make it easier to me. What is the quality of such a thread? Basically everyone is responding to AI’s translation. If the original topic was not high quality already, it will get worse and worse… And I think me responding “English-Only” will not fix that.

Maybe my whole point can be reduced really. Can a meaningful discussion be maintained in a mix of languages bridged by a robot? Will opening to anyone with any language skills and lowering the barrier to the all-time-low really improve the discussion?

I have to emphasize: I am really happy with this community being full of people that invest their energy into:

  1. Learning a new technology
  2. Learning a new language (if applicable)
  3. Learning how to discuss in the first place

One of those will not be necessary now. But not even that. It will be replaced by a robot. Win or lose?

It can also be used for older or adult learners of a foreign language, where the challenge of speaking comprehensibly, and understanding, is more difficult because of the low volume, and hence a greater mastery of the fine points of pronunciation is required.[21]

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10

I’ll try something here (I’m writing this in Czech) – I got a failing grade from the teacher today.

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Now this is interesting. I wrote this sentence in Czech. We have grades numbered 1–5 where 1 is the best and 5 is the worst at school.

I wrote exactly:

Today I’ve got 5 from my teacher.

In English it translated actually pretty well, preserving the meaning (although not the very fact). I briefly checked other languages and it is not that great.

In German it said “Fünf” but they have 6 grades in Germany. So 5 means failing—but they have something even worse than that (imagine!).

But if a German speaking Swiss person reads it, they have it vice versa (5 is the second after the best)!

In Japanese, it still mentions number 5, which means actually “Best” in Japan.

Now imagine Czech, German, Swiss and Japanese go to the bar…

Oh, and I checked Finland and there it is even funnier!

1개의 좋아요
17

One sec…

What feature can we add to Discourse to ban “cut and paste” round trips into Google Translate???

Should we provide end users with the ability to disable “copy” by overriding CTRL-C on the keyboard???

Much of this discussion feels like an intellectual exercise. Part of TOS of the vast majority of forums out there is that “you are giving rights to the forum operators, in return for the value they provide you by giving you an online community”

Where I do stand strongly on is “labeling” we want it to be clear that content is translated and ensure it is always easy to reach to the original, I certainly support iterating on our UI.

“originally written in German - see original by clicking here”

Is a bit too much noise to add to every single post, but I am sure we can come up with a friendly and clear way of labeling stuff.

Also … the “I speak Lang 1 / 2 / 3 so show me original in those languages” is valuable. I have this very problem on X cause I am multilingual. Showing the languages I speak also is handy at giving better nuance to the community when cross translation is happening.

9개의 좋아요
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I don’t think anyone suggested that you prevent that. I had the impression that this was preferred because it creates awareness that it is a translation.

And I also have the impression that currently not all users are aware of that. That leads to misunderstandings like in Edit of hidden entry blocked period setting where the site setting name I provided was translated, and the user didn’t notice so it didn’t help them.

I can understand the feeling of wanting to opt out of getting one’s posts translated in order to avoid misunderstandings. As I said in the other topic: I wonder what would have happened if I had written my post that caused misunderstandings in German and AI had translated it the way I posted it. Would my intentions have been interpreted differently then? Or would the reaction have been the same?

3개의 좋아요
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I want to take a step back here.

If it was

  1. Crystal clear it is a translation
  2. Somehow easier to get at original (it is already 1 click)

What problem remains?

2개의 좋아요
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This thread was supposed to be longer but simple feedback and a feature suggestion. While discussing it I realized it is something much more complicated and it may not have a solution at all or it will take a long time before finding it.

There are many subtle issues that may appear only over some time, frustrating one use after another. I deeply value CDCK’s main motivation to create Discourse—to support civil discussions. I loved that from the first time I installed it 10 years ago. It was the selling point for me, no matter how good or bad the product was. I believed that with this mission you would create a great product. And I think I was right.

Quite some.

Product Localization Issues

I localized a few software packages, Discourse is one of 2 big ones. I also created several large software packages. It’s a lot of work with the language if you want to do it properly. Naming something inconsistently frustrates the users. Being it in the app or in the documentation. Sometimes I find a better Czech word for what you have a simple English term (but we don’t) and I have to go through the whole Discourse translations in order to check it is being used consistently.

So then you see @Moin‘s trouble with just a small bit—a quoted setting. If you support Czech one day and every Czech person will be able to read all Meta in their language, I am worried. Because I bet that 50 % will be translated badly. All the site settings etc. will have incorrect names. Because it was not straightforward to find words that have similar meanings to what you mean in another language. There were several options and I had to choose. Sometimes against the translation AI suggestions.

Deeper Discussions

Then there are discussions like this one. It is a complicated discussion from my point of view. It is critical, so I really have to think a lot and write things with some cultural perspectives in mind. I kind of know to whom I write because I read your profiles and know the countries you are from. The fact that we all know English already means something. It means we came closer and share some bits of a common culture already. We kind of know what sounds funny in English so we don’t have to always say things like “fyi that’s a Czech joke”.

We already know the obstacles in finding words for what we want to say, we made mistakes in the past and now we try not to repeat them. See this test I just made here

If I am using a foreign language the probability is high that I am also aware of not just translation problems. It might be that I learned (maybe hard way) that grades in school are not same around the world. So I don’t tell you which grade I’ve got when in USA you have letters. AI knows as well so it translated “failing grade” to English. But failed miserably with other languages and just gave you the number. But this is exactly what I would write if I would be communicating in a Czech forum with Czech people (you all would seem Czech suddenly). So I would not worry at all that you don’t understand. And the conversation would get very weird from the 3rd post on.

And this is a very simple problem. Imagine that you start losing meaning one word after another throughout an important discussion.

Like in the Telephone game I mentioned. AI translation works as the “noise” here. You start with something and end up with something completely different.

Me, The Author

So what I wanted to suggest was that I started feeling bad as an author here. I want to contribute but I want to have more control. Like a book author who has to agree on translations of their books. The translation will never ever sound anything like the original even with the greatest care. Authors know it. So it’s not like anyone can translate their books anytime. They would choose the translator, at least, and check how the book sounds in the new language.

I have no control over it here. I want to be understood, I really care about it. Maybe 95 % of the posts here are simple technical things, be it. But I would be discouraged to start anything deeper and more meaningful if I knew I am carelessly (AI) translated into multiple languages and cultures. No amount of warning would solve it. It’s out there and people will use it because it is easy. No one will ever read the original. And people will start responding to my thread based on those bad translations and I will read bad translations of what they wrote. I would be very unhappy.

4개의 좋아요
25

Well, if you are writing in Germany I can guarantee we don’t have misunderstandings without translations. Same thing if I use Finnish.

How is this any kind win-situation?

This is not matter of translation issues that are easily solved just by asking. This is matter of making communication as strongly behind borders as possible and force to use lingua franca — because earlier was no other solution, because there wasn’t any translators. Now we have such tool.

And I ask for what reason someone feels it’s his/hers/its right to dictate what language I use to reading — and if I’m guessing right that was Sam’s point about copy&paste.

There is already tools if someone want to read original language. There is a mark to show when something is federated (oh dear, even there someone can use a translator and misunderstand things :smirking_face:) and hopefully everyone is using somekind mark when an AI is participating. And we have a mark for translators.

But that isn’t the point now. It is to give writers rights to say when translations are made or not. It is not about tags and buttons.

1개의 좋아요
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That was exactly where I started. And to answer your question “who am I to say?” The answer is simple: The author of the content here. The content that powers the forum. The actual product “sold” here.

But now I am asking really a more sophisticated question: Will multilinguality kill meta? Will lowering the entry barriers bring more quality? That’s more of my concern now. I know you think “Yes of course! Everyone should join!”. While I whisper “I am not sure, maybe the language barrier was a good one to filter all the noise…”.

I remember the days when we had content farms. So many websites where people would generate tons of texts in order to trick SEO. And the websites using that quickly degraded in search results. Because we all know it is not a real content, people were paid to generate it. And I have a feeling (not knowledge, cannot prove it) that auto-translations would somehow fall into that space. Not a real content.

And I would feel like being the person that supports the content farm. I write something here and 20 other versions automatically emerge. And people start writing back nonsense… And there is nothing to do about it.

Actually I also fear that meta could end up like those cheap Q&A sites that we used before StackOverflow appeared with its great curated content. Which I know has a shared history with Discourse, of course.

1개의 좋아요
27

Meta is primarily a discussion forum for talking about Discourse features / bugs / UX niggles and so on.

If a bug is carefully described in German and then I read it in English - odds are reasonably high I will understand what the bug is. With the right prompting, we can also get AI to present that bug to a wider audience so they are clear that it was a bug and was fixed.

Another question worth wrestling with… only 8% of Japanese people speak English, compared to say 45% of Czech people.

English as a filter for “people capable of civilized Discourse online” may hold as some sort of litmus test in some countries where all the “high quality people speak fantastic English” but certainly not in all countries.

Yes, some nuanced Discussion is very hard to translate. But it is important to note that AI translation today is the worst it will ever be. As time passed we can capture better nuance and better voicing. In fact I just read your post in Hebrew and it was pretty faithful, all your major points were captured solid 8 out of 10.

5개의 좋아요
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But this specific use case will not happen anymore. You see we keep the thread in English while the translation can go on in the context of the whole communication (I don’t know if it does but it could). Translating one way English → other languages. So we have a stable 8/10 translation of the whole thread. That’s very good!

Let’s say Czech-Hebrew is 7/10.

So I would start in Czech and you would read 7/10 in Hebrew.

Then you would reply in Hebrew and I would read 7/10 Czech translation.

To make it funnier, now Japanese would join in with 7/10 version (but different 7/10 – some special language quirks other than Czech-Hebrew).

And let’s say @Jagster would be also willing to contribute with his very special language.

English would not be involved. At all.

People talking in their own boxes, nothing in common, not even a sense of it. And there is something out of their will that tries to make them understand each other. (Actually not—just doing its job—translation. The job is not “let them understand each other”. AI will never care like a human translator who would ask “Did you mean X or Y?” before going on with the translation.)

Are you really positive this could work in any circumstances? Even human translators would refuse to serve this, I believe. It’s not about AI being good enough. If it is 9.8/10 in a thread of 100 posts I believe it would just fail no matter what.

I imagine it like a campfire. People sitting together at night, talking, singing, experiencing the warmth of the fire. Now you say “We can stream the fire to the whole world, now we have the tools!”. So from now on everyone will make their own small campfire at home. You know, it’s just easier, you don’t have to travel anywhere and all that hard stuff. And we will stream the campfire to everyone’s place. Solved. You have fire? Check. You see everyone else? Check. Even more people can join! (that was not the request, but Check). So you are together at a campfire with your friends! No.

Now that reminded me the Covid parties. We actually lived through this.

32

Maybe using a translation/language icon next to the history / time icons on the post?

:+1: Firefox shows a “Never translate for this language” option

Also: always show me the original can be valuable. I have found that traveling to places where I cannot speak the language saves me from advertising… And the web became such a place.

Note: maybe move the existing comments on this topic from the original announcement to here?

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