I want to continue on what I realized when discussing the culprits of automatic translations. Most of the discussion was about how the Discourse Admin can set up the site so it translates (or doesn’t) nicely and when it does, how should the users be informed on what they read (what is the original language, if it is a translation etc.).
But I have another point of view:
There was an argument that proxies do some translation in order to bring traffic:
But I want to talk about the source of information, meaning when you finally get to the post the author wrote, what will you see?
So let’s take Meta as an example and have a look from these different points of view and aims:
Site owner (CDCK): We want to talk to as many people as possible, so we turn on AI localization
Reader: I want to read easily everything in the languages I am confident with (my mother language and whatever others I learned I want to read the originals, otherwise auto-translate into my mother language)
Writer: Now there are two options
A) I write in any language and I am fine with you translating it to anything you want
B) I am very careful on what I write and how I write it in the language I have chosen (here on Meta it would be English as the original forum’s master language) and I want to opt out from automatic translations that you offer.
So B is my point. Me as a contributor, I want to have some control over what you do here with my contributions, no matter how you imagine the forum to work. I am fine that some people will not be able to understand what I say. If I write English I may expect people also learn English in order to understand me—I had to learn English myself in the first place. And I don’t want to be misunderstood just for the sake of being heard by as many people as possible.
So this feature is about the author to be able to control the level of translation of their posts.
And if you would imagine implementing it, of course it can get more complicated—if I speak multiple languages I may go as far as localizing my post manually. Not likely, but in theory, yes.
That is… something. Are you really demanding that from every living person in the Earth, just because you’ve learned English
Sure. It could be done. Then every posts where author says what a reader must can, should be hidden from every single translated topics. Because that would then be just fair.
This will be interesting world when every italian, spanish speaking, portugese, russians, chinese, vietnamise… will follow your idea.
Why do you think those are un-related? You just told why you want to get something using very philosophical reason and now some reason is not suitable?
I really dislike double standards. But it is not your place to say what I can or cannot do. You make your choise to write or not, nothing more.
It will be a very sad world if people stop trying to learn each other’s language. A global war in less than 5 years. Even without AI being evil. And I am being optimistic here.
Thanks for your feedback but I guess it might be even against the community rules to react on a topic just because you don’t share the author’s point of view. There are many Discourse features I wouldn’t use and I don’t announce that on each of them, much less telling the authors how stupid they are.
If you, as an author, don’t care how you are presented—I am totally fine. I am not and I didn’t come here to hear I was a wrong person and I think it’s not even a goal of this forum. I am more than fine hearing that it won’t be done, though or that there is another solution to my problem. A civil and constructive discussion. Thank you.
And as for your question: Do I demand everyone to learn English? No. I don’t need everyone to read what I wrote. But if they do, I want them to see only the original. And if they want to see translation, I want them to use their own tool so they are conscious when translating something. So they know it is not perfect. I am afraid, that, as the AI auto-translation is implemented and will be used, will make people lazy to study what the original was. And lazy to talk back to me in the language I understand. And I want to opt-out from that as an author on this site. I was very happy with English speaking community from around the world and I have a strong feeling that the content would degrade if everyone of us would start talking in our languages, while letting AI auto-translate to everyone else’s. Not with very technical topics, but definitely with deeper topics like this one.
I think auto-translation should be enabled for categories like Support or Bug but wisely considered for any deeper categories like Feature or Site feedback and enabled but redacted manually in e.g. Documentation or Community wiki. If not, even as a reader I may start to be worried about the content quality.
Basically Discourse now switched from the business of 100% super-high-quality UGC (User Generated Content) to Semi-AIGC (one post is UGC—the original, all the translations are basically AI generated, although everyone expects them to be correct—but still— they are totally AI generated and no human will read through all of them to make sure something didn’t go wrong). And since people will start responding to AIGC, it might get very messy.
It’s a big step.
And my question is: Do I want to be part of that? Or at least to have an option to stay away?
This is a good topic, I agree having writing being automatically translated without that being clear to readers can be a problem. Annother possible solution is there being an alert banner to notify readers what the original language is they are reading and what system was used to translate that.
English is one of the most bizzare languages that has ever existed, wherin a few minor alterations to sentence structure or grammer can drastically change the meaning of a sentence or way readers may interpret that.
Now when you say it like this, maybe it would not even solve my problem.
Let’s say I am English speaking (but not native). Now we have a topic that goes like this:
Master Topic: SomeLanguage
Response: EnglishLanguage
Response: SomeLanguage
Response: TotallyDifferentLanguage
Everything gets translated into English but only the 1st response is actually from an English speaker.
Now what language is this thread in? No warnings will make it easier to me. What is the quality of such a thread? Basically everyone is responding to AI’s translation. If the original topic was not high quality already, it will get worse and worse… And I think me responding “English-Only” will not fix that.
Maybe my whole point can be reduced really. Can a meaningful discussion be maintained in a mix of languages bridged by a robot? Will opening to anyone with any language skills and lowering the barrier to the all-time-low really improve the discussion?
I have to emphasize: I am really happy with this community being full of people that invest their energy into:
Learning a new technology
Learning a new language (if applicable)
Learning how to discuss in the first place
One of those will not be necessary now. But not even that. It will be replaced by a robot. Win or lose?
It can also be used for older or adult learners of a foreign language, where the challenge of speaking comprehensibly, and understanding, is more difficult because of the low volume, and hence a greater mastery of the fine points of pronunciation is required.[21]
