Hello there, I’ve enabled Discourse AI on our community forum and started backfilling into multiple languages. Around 60% of posts and topics are translated, but in the process, I’m getting a LOT of errors in the console (ai_translation_verbose_logs is enabled) and now backfilling has mostly stalle…

I’ve found ai_api_audit_logs and I think I’ve found the issue. When translation is sent, there’s a get_max_tokens function which assigns max tokens based on text length. Problem is, it’s mostly used up by reasoning. See this audit log, the limit was set to 1000, and reasoning took the whole 1000 b…

[image] panrafal: Problem is, it’s mostly used up by reasoning. I simply do not recommend using any type of thinking models for translation tasks. [image] Nuenki | The more LLMs think, the worse they translate Testing LLMs across multiple different thinking strategies demonstrate…

[image] Falco: I simply do not recommend using any type of thinking models for translation tasks. My experience is quite the opposite. I have a set of instructions that I want to be followed that require understanding the context, which are either ignored by non-thinking models, or applied in…

[image] panrafal: I reduced thinking effort to low based on my findings and got all the translations come through. But I believe limiting the output tokens like that is counter-productive, as thinking models are not restricted from being used in translations, and user have no clue why it’s faili…

[image] Falco: I believe the newer version of OpenAI Responses API applies max_tokens without counting the thinking tokens, which solves this issue. I’m trying the latest GPT-5. I saw exactly the same issue with Gemini 2.5 Pro and 2.5 Flash. Why not to just increase the limit a bit? I’ve spe…

I disabled the streaming and it made it much better (and still does thinking)

We just merged an update that gives you access to a new setting ai_translation_max_tokens_multiplier which defaults to 1. You should be able to bump this up to any number you like to deal with the limit you’re seeing. https://github.com/discourse/discourse/pull/35859

Discourse AI Failing to translate large number of posts and topics

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Falco (Falco) October 13, 2025, 12:52pm 3

I simply do not recommend using any type of thinking models for translation tasks.

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Discourse AI Failing to translate large number of posts and topics

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