While I like the idea of a “translate now” button (and I’ve cast my vote for it!), it doesn’t resolve the larger concern that was raised: We present translated content that will not be representative of the content in the original language if more than 2 edits have taken place in a single day, and neither the author of the post nor the readers will know this is the case. This makes the translation feature less credible as a tool on our platform.
Examples:
- On our own internal site, a “source of truth” OP in a topic may be edited multiple times in a day as replies highlight additional details that need to be added or changed.
- On the site I used to manage, it was common for an OP about a trending support issue to be wikified and edited multiple times during a day, providing valuable issue workarounds that were shared in order to offload support requests, saving the company time and money.
- And of course, as mentioned above, updates to an event could require multiple edits. Imagine traveling to an in-person event and showing up on the wrong day because the date was changed after the two-day edit retranslation limit had been reached!
Even if the feature to allow site staff to trigger retranslation were available, if the edit is made by someone who is unaware of the limit, they would not know they need to request retranslation, and on a busy site, staff may not notice that the translation is no longer true to the original.
Could the daily limit be a site setting, to empower the site owner to determine their own perfect balance between reliable translations and managing LLM costs?
Could we add a warning about the limit when a user edits a translated post, so they’ll be aware? We warn about other rate limited features.
Perhaps others have suggestions, as well?