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.
I think this is actually a good and deep point. I totally understand the goal of lowering the barrier. On the other hand there are people who are fluent in multiple languages and enjoy communicating in those. So they could use both Chinese and French and English. By blending everything into “my language” it actually kills the diversity, subtle cultural and language differences get hidden and no one is actually motivated to understand another culture anymore. It will result in even a bigger gap instead of connecting, like social networks did. It is actually very self-centric to get everything in my own language.
As I said I fully understand the motivation to have e.g. docs translated to multiple languages if the product is global. There are culprits though even there, as someone else pointed out, it brings other problems. Like that we, Discourse localizers, choose very specific terms sometimes that AI can never guess. So it never ends up with a good translation out of the box. But that can be trained, I suppose.
So my point is — maybe there should be more options. Something that actually helps to spread the product and lower the barriers but does not cripple our intelligence and potential. Of course it might happen that I switch to Czech if supported here and never even consider you all speak different languages. But honestly, I love knowing what different cultures you are and that we all are somehow trying to understand each other conscientiously by choosing a common language.
I guess this is what the OP had in his mind.
Hard product choices. But I believe in Discourse team’s deep values and creativity to solve this
Jos tätä ei käännettäisi, niin onnea matkaan ymmärtää kulttuuriani ja ajatuksiani. Mutta onneksi tämä käännetään, niin sinun ei tarvitse miettiä mitään muuta kuin sisältöä ja mahdollisuutta, että asia on kadonnut käännöksessä — ilman käännöstä sinun ei tarvitsisi murehtia edes niitä.
Tässä sotketaan nyt rajusti kaunokirjalliset käännökset ja niiden laatu foorumiympäristöön.
Toisessa mediassa aiheen vierestä keskusteltiin englanniksi. Ihan siksi, että se oli ainoa yhteinen kieli. Toki siihen eivät voineet osallistua sellaiset, jotka eivät osanneet englantia tai uskoivat omaavansa liian huonon kirjalliset kyvyt. Mutta ilmeisesti se on hyväksyttävä syy, koska silloin ei tarvitse murehtia kääntäjän mahdollisesti hukkaamista tai sotkemista asioista — ihmisten kielitaito sen sijaan ei ilmeisesti ole ongelma, kuten englannissa väärien prepositioiden käyttö, joka sotkee äkkiä koko lausemerkityksen.
Mutta siinä keskustelussa oli selvästi kaksi linjaa:
he, jotka ovat tottuneet tekstitettyihin elokuviin ja käännöskirjallisuuteen, suhtautuivat paljon myönteisemmin automaattisiin käännöksiin
natiivit englanninpuhujat ja he, joilla elokuvat tulevat dubattuina, olivat vahvemmin vastaan
Oli kolmaskin ryhmä. He, jotka suhtautuvat kategorisesti AI-käyttöä vastaan. Heillä ei ollut mielipidettä käännöksistä, vaan ongelma oli työkalu.
Mutta tämä kaikki on puhdasta metaa. Klikkaa käännökset pois päältä, niin saa lukea tämänkin alkukielisenä. Jos osaa.
Hey. You just proved my point here. You seem to be defending something here but I was not complaining. There is nothing to defend. So you see. Maybe you did not mean it but the translation makes it look like it to me. We are in a “civilized discussion” business here. It’s not about the tools capabilities but about the outcome.
So I was merely helping to raise the very deep issue, that is not technical at all. It’s a question worth opening without a possible solution.
I believe that if I am trying and spend energy into understanding others it is better than if I am not. So you could be lazy and write Finnish, I can be lazy and answer Czech. Maybe we can try. But I have a feeling that there is something to learn from the history, that it may not end up as great as it seems. Communication is hard even if we speak the same language. Spending less energy might not help. Short term—no doubt. Long term? That´s where I wonder.
And for your thought that I need only to focus on the content without thinking about your culture? Just no. What you write is not about the content itself but a lot about your context. Including your culture and language and its options.
I think Youtube is a good example of how automatic translation can be less than helpful (I ended up installing a browser extension to force the original titles). And as you mention, it would really be nice to have not a single, but multiple languages which are not translated.
Bonus points if I can choose to which language other languages are auto-translated (I find auto-translations to English to be better on average than auto-translations to German).
What probably complicates things for the Discourse team: this would be a per-user thing, and not globally applicable to all users. E.g. thinking about a community in which I’m active: almost everyone speaks German, many users are also comfortable with English, and there’s a number of users who also read French (and then a handful of users with knowledge in other languages).
On top of that, there’s also question of mixed content. E.g. I will sometimes write German posts, but quote English articles or press releases directly. And if auto-translation is applied here, it would be nice to be able to show the original language just for the quoted part.
Similarly, if people are posting in multiple languages, and I’m proficient in one of them (e.g. post contains a French and an English part), I don’t want auto-translations by default. At least not for the whole post.
That being said, I do think the translation feature has value, and can provide people not proficient in a specific language with at least a basic understanding of what’s written there.
in the composer. This ideally shouldn’t be necessary, but sometimes the LLM decides (wrongly) that you’re writing in French instead of English.
