AI translation backfill not working after all settings configured

Support
,
1

I’m trying to enable automatic content localization (AI translation backfill) on my self-hosted Discourse instance and I’ve followed all the available guidelines, but I’m not seeing any translations appear.

Here’s what I’ve done so far:

  • Enabled content localization enabled
  • Selected at least one language in content localization supported locales
  • Enabled ai translation enabled
  • Chosen a working ai translation model (test is successful)
  • Set ai_translation_backfill_hourly_rate to a number greater than 0 (using the environment variable method in app.yml)
  • Set ai translation max age days to a large value

After saving and rebuilding, I posted topics in a different language than my user language preference, but nothing gets translated. I don’t see any evidence of translation jobs running (tried checking Sidekiq scheduled/queues), and the user-facing content remains untranslated.

Is there anything else I should check, or any way to better diagnose why the translation backfill is not triggering?

1 Like
3

What is your ai_translation_backfill_hourly_rate – can you try 20 to begin with? It would help if you could share all the values.

Are all your posts public and not in restricted categories? If ai_translation_backfill_limit_to_public_content is disabled, you won’t have any posts translated.

SiteSetting.ai_translation_verbose_logs=true will show some details when it’s successful.

Alternatively if you have data explorer, you can try the following to see

  • if there are any LLM calls to translate
  • or if post locales are getting detected but the posts are not translated
SELECT COUNT(*)
FROM ai_api_audit_logs
WHERE feature_name = 'translation'

SELECT COUNT(*)
FROM posts
WHERE (locale IS NOT NULL AND locale <> '')
1 Like
4

Thank you for your reply!

  • My DISCOURSE_AI_TRANSLATION_BACKFILL_HOURLY_RATE is set to 30.
  • ai_translation_backfill_limit_to_public_content is enabled.
  • All of my posts are public and not in any restricted categories.
5

Were these the jobs you were looking for?

scheduled jobs
scheduled jobs1720×718 146 KB

Please also do check the queries mentioned above.

6

Thank you for your suggestion!

Yes, I can see these jobs in Sidekiq under /sidekiq/scheduler:

  • Jobs::PostLocalizationBackfill
  • Jobs::TopicLocalizationBackfill
  • Jobs::TopicsLocaleDetectionBackfill

They all appear with status “OK” and have recently run.

I also noticed that the topic titles are being translated correctly, but the post content itself is not translated yet.
Should I simply wait longer for the content to be processed, or is there another setting that I need to check for post content translation?