Everything is translated, help!

Site feedback
1

I’m so lost. The language I had selected for the interface on meta.discourse.org contaminated its content.

  • The content of the forum is auto translated, which is very confusing as soon as I’m looking at a topic regarding translations or anything language related;
  • I see no means of disabling this behavior in the UX;
  • Even worse, not everything-everything seems to be translated, some topics randomly seems to still be in english. Language switching is mind-consuming. :exploding_head:

I searched for news about this and found nothing.
I found this plugin which I guess is the culprit if it’s activated in here, but I’m unsure.
I mostly want to make sure this whole thing doesn’t get into the instances I’m managing so I’m posting in UX. Feel free to move this topic to a better place if needed.

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2

Hey there,

we’ll be publishing some docs regarding this feature very soon.

In the meantime, you can toggle with this button:

Screenshot 2025-06-17 at 5.56.33 PM copy 2
Screenshot 2025-06-17 at 5.56.33 PM copy 22456×1658 410 KB

This button only appears in topics with localized posts.

When writing a post, you can also set that you’re writing it in English in the :globe_with_meridians: in the composer. This ideally shouldn’t be necessary, but sometimes the LLM decides (wrongly) that you’re writing in French instead of English.

4

Thanks for the answers. Questions left:

  • What is a localized post?
  • I cannot find the :globe_with_meridians: in the composer.

Opinion on UX: this behavior should be manageable in the user settings under language, on top of the toggle button.

PS: nice rickroll!

5

I’ll be sharing my initial thoughts after some experimentation, as the team works to finalize the official updates and documentation.

The latest versions of Discourse and the Translator AI plugin allows to manually select a post’s language.

In the future, I hope to see this automatically identified, perhaps as ‘different than default,’ for greater convenience.

And perhaps is something that will be mixed with IA Personas, you can check their code updates on Github as well :wink:

6

Hmm this recent one is a good example: Login API Umleitung raus nehmen.

Yeah, this is currently gated by a site-setting, but could probably be visible to the author of the post too.

Hmm, this is not true – the translator plugin does not do this, it’s in Discourse core itself (meta does not use translator any more). Also, it can be automatically identified if the AI plugin is installed and set up. All good though, docs will come soon™ and the assumptions here are useful to help add clarity in them.

Thanks for the feedback. The goal of the feature is to entirely remove language barriers, and therefore have every single post localized. We’re still validating some assumptions before going hail mary.

3 Likes
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I cannot emphasize enough how this is important. One of the worst UX I have on the internet in general these days is whenever I read user-generated content that I believe is in one language, then realize it’s been auto-translated, because the translation necessarily loses meaning, let alone as I mentioned earlier when the subject discussed is language-related.
As an example, YouTube now allows you to define one single language you are supposed to understand, and auto-translates everything to that language, so I have to choose if I want my french video titles badly translated to english, or my english video titles badly translated to french.

@nat I hope this is taken into account by the “entirely remove language barrier” project, and that it will never be “the language in which this was written doesn’t matter”. Anyway, thanks for the insight!

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For sure.

To be crystal clear, this feature is entirely opt-in on every Discourse community. And there being various types of communities available – tech support, branding, narrative, social, gaming, and so on – there are some that might benefit from this more than others. Discourse allows community owners to set the tone through prompts and plain ol’ moderation.

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