Highly intrusive and undisclosed Auto-Translation

UX
, ,
1

I am not sure if this is an issue with Roblox Devforum’s implementation of it or Discourse in general, because I just end up facing Discourse when im using Roblox’s devforums. But either way, if something from this side can be done in regards to it, I’d be glad.

Every post is autotranslated with no signaling that its a translation and not the original post. If it weren’t for the stiffness and inaccuracy of the machine-translation, I wouldn’t be sure if im reading a post actually written in the language im reading, or if its an AI slop rendition of it. It can get very misleading.

The only way for me to get original content that was made in english, is if I LOG IN to an account, and then set the translation preference of that account to english. But then that gets me out of being able to understand posts that ARE in a language that I do understand and I don’t need translation to English for. Besides how logging in just for that is very annoying.

To summarize, the lack of signaling of autotranslation, that being the default option and there being no agency towards whether I want it or not, before it immediately gets shoved up my face, all together make the perfect rage-inducing situation.

I realize this has been a tendency in several platforms after the rise of Ai translation. Youtube, reddit too before so much backlash made them refine that feature.

Even though theres a way to get around it, one shouldn’t have to battle off settings jungle for every application they’re using, just to have the content they’re trying to access being displayed on its original language as opposed to machine-translated? So even if its a matter of Roblox dealing with it, I do think that there should be some kind of universally prescribed manual override option to it, preferably already on by default for all Discourse forums that are using autotranslation?

Wasn’t the classical, time-honored prompt in the detected language, “this is in another language, want to translate it?” okay? Why assume the user cannot decide for themselves whether to view a thing on its originally written way or not? One can then deactivate seeing the prompt if wanted. But thats what should be a setting, not the other way around.

Furthermore, if in the meanwhile anyone has any hacky solution for this problem such as programatically altering some kind of variable, using an extension on the browser, etc.. so I can make-do while theres no other way, I’d too appreciate it.

Thank you

2 Likes
3

I’m not familiar with their approach, so for the rest of the post I’ll assume they are early adopters of our new content localization feature.

We add multiple indicators of translation

image
image1881×1372 319 KB

Admins can pick their preferred LLM model for translation, as well as leave translations to only happen manually via users too.

There is a single click button to swap between original and translated

3 Likes
4

Welcome to our community, @Ethaphu! :sunflower:

The autotranslation functionality is still rather new and we are always making improvements to the UX. This is great feedback and will be taken into consideration!

This to me is the most important feedback here, in my opinion. I agree it can be hard to tell that you are looking at translated content, without already knowing how the autotranslation works.

The buttons Falco points out do the job, but you also need to know they are there and how to use them. Subjective opinion, but they also don’t scream “choose your preferred language” or “this is translated; toggle show in original language” to me.

I added the translation and content-localization tags to this topic - if you follow the links to those tags you will see that the issues you raise have come up before and are being talked through. In particular this Feature topic is related: