Hi, I noticed the langage switcher in the header today, this translates the site, interface and content, to another language, but does this means I can post content in that other language or should I continue to post in English ?
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You can use supported languages.
My opinion is that we should use English if possible. But not everyone can English, or are shy to use it because skills are close to my rally English [1], and then this option lowers language barrier big time. I really like this option, in here and generally.
Finnish rally drivers are known about heavy accent and using Finnish structure in sentences ↩︎
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Okay, but let’s imagine that I reply or post in French. If users who use the English interface do not activate multilingual translation, they will not be able to read my messages in French and may not even know that it is French?
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Yes it is.
But if someone want to read in original language, then it is quote hard to get tranlated content 
It is matter of choice, from both parties. If you write in English, it is still translated to French. If you use English, it is translated to English. And my choise is choose between original and translated version — and it is quite easy choice, because I can about 50 words in French…
With Chinese that helps, a lot.
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Oh, did you mean this:
I changed to French, and that post was still shown in English. When I didn’t use localization, aka. translating, everything was in English. Did I mess something 
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Yes there seems to be a mix of languages in that case.
Another question, if people can write in any supported languages, when I browse the site in English, will I see those original languages not translated because English is the default language or will I see those different languages ? In other words, selecting English translates everything in English or leaves the content untranslated ?
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It depends. There is a toggle near the timeline which allows you to decide whether to see everything in the language it was written in or to translate everything into your interface language. That works for all languages you can select in the header.
So for example in this topic there is a mix of German and English. My interface language on Meta is English. I can read the posts in the language they were written in or read everything in English.
I prefer to post in English because automatic translations are not perfect, and I like to control the version most users will read (or can at least use as a fallback when the automatic translation seems strange). Things get complicated when setting names are translated or when translators use slightly different terms when they translate the Discourse interface. For example in a German post I’d use “Team” for staff because that’s the name of the group when your interface is German. But AI will translate “Team” without that knowledge and there is no default “team” group in English. So it could easily be mixed up with the team group here at Meta.
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Yes though impressive I must admit, this poses some good questions.
Ich arbeite auch gerade an einer Community mit mehreren Sprachen, das Feature funktioniert eingetllich sehr gut. Nur es gibt so einige Sachen wie zerstörte Zitate oder auch das die AI Zusammenfassungen nicht übersetzt werden. Ansonsten bin ich zufrieden.
Edit:
Was mir ausgefallen ist das im Language switcher and language content - #9 by Moin in der Ăśbersetzen Version das Video und Zitat nicht angezeigt wird.
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Actually everything after the video is missing. I’ll fix the German translation
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Great conversation here!
I found out the reason –
There is a little quirk with detection for post language, a problem which solution has been eluding me. In the text you wrote in English but it has mentions of French. Depending on which LLM sometimes it would be detected as French or English. (In case you are curious, the prompt looks like this).
When a post is detected to be French, we skip translating to French – the first step of this feature (which is language detection) is very important and can cause confusion downstream if it’s wrong. 
As it was designed, if I write in “Indonesian” now (a language not supported on meta), it should still translate to English and all the other languages we support.
The site setting content_localization_supported_locales define the languages that any content can be translated to.
This is a great question and I’ve incorporated it into our FAQ:
My personal opinion is to write in what you’re comfortable with 
Turning on this feature on meta allows us to test and improve the feature and prompts.
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Todellako kääntää kaiken, mutta ilmeisesti foorumin oletuskielelle? Kirjoitan edelleenkin täällä englanniksi (tai jotain, joka etäisesti muistuttaa sitä), mutta omalla foorumillani tuo ominaisuus on melkoisen arvokas lisä.
A reason we are not doing it is because each additional language that’s being translated counts towards a site’s LLM quota. It needs to be an explicit decision to translate to the site’s default language.
A good middle ground is perhaps to add the forum’s default language to the dropdown option by default (for sites that have not set it up yet). Hmm, that said I am not sure about the mechanics of changing one site setting based on another site setting.
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Translating toward all supported languages should or could be an admin setting — perhaps hidden one, because it could be quite costly indeed. But on forums that uses other default than english, that setting would be nice add. Or… unsupported language could be translated to default and English.
Is this more or less a feature request? Or too costly to build at the moment?
In what way would that setting work differently than when you add all available locales to Content localization supported locales?
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Because that translates everything to everything. What I suggest is unsupported would be translated to supported ones in post level. Big difference.
We have a forum defaulted to German. I write there in Finnish [1] and it will be translated to Germany. English speakers can’t understand a bit, even it would be a supported language and de facto standard globally.
Sure, what happen when someone replies in Germany, because that user saw translated content in Germany. We have a mess.
I don’t know how to solve this issue. But this is a questionmark in non-English forums and the demand start to be that everyone outside massive languages must be at least bi-lingual. Well, we quite often are
Anyway. It is nice add-on that post can be written in any language. My issue is that is such situation global audience can’t read it, unless they can default language, because understanding supported ones is not enough.
Non of chinese can’t undestand my previous post written in Finnish, unless they can English too.
such behaviour is really problematic, and in the past at the age before social media we had big issues with one nationality; but then was then and now is now ↩︎