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.
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.
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 in the composer. This ideally shouldn’t be necessary, but sometimes the LLM decides (wrongly) that you’re writing in French instead of English.
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.
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!
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.