One way to improve (make it easier) would be to allow a specific post to be translated/untranslated instead of the whole topic. I didn’t even realize what “1 click” thing you were talking about at first since I was looking at a specific post’s translation icon and couldn’t click it.
I can’t tell if the translation was enabled by default or if I clicked it by accident at some point, but personally I think it’s important to show the original text by default. At least initially that is. Let the user click a button one time and have that persist, sure, but make the user do something to opt into translation. This is for two reasons:
- So the user knows posts are being translated because they explicitly opted in (the tiny icon on a post may not be obvious until users become accustomed to the translation feature). Or otherwise make it very obvious the first time via a banner or popup, with a “don’t do this” button.
- To not have a negative impact on multi-lingual users. I haven’t run into this to my knowledge, but I’ve heard a lot of complaints about people on YouTube that are bilingual in German and English (but with UI set to German) having English-title videos auto-translated to German, to the point that the titles don’t make sense. Granted, that’s probably a bigger problem on YouTube, where titles are shorter and may use specialized words or clickbait words.
By the way, will this be optional for admins to enable/disable site-wide and will it be on or off by default? Most of the discourse communities I take part on are primarily in English but for the purpose of learning Japanese (and sometimes other languages), so languages other than English are common but shouldn’t be auto-translated. I just want to make sure those sites wouldn’t be negatively impacted.