But writing messages online is very different from writing books, no? As much as I’d love for the quality and type of communication in forums to be book-like, it simply isn’t. Most people in forums are trying to discuss straightforward, often technical, often practical things. Having a good-enough translation is very useful, it’s akin to an accessibility feature. Yes, AI can fail to translate the meaning for complex arguments… but the medium (forums) isn’t really well suited for complex arguments anyway.
And, the benefit for people that can’t read the dominant languages (say, English for meta) is very tangible. I love seeing people write bug reports here in their language and me being able to understand what they mean even though I can’t speak or read their language. And me or others being able to help without speaking a word of their language. It would be a shame to stop being helpful to people on the premise that the translating mechanism is not 100% perfect.
We’re veering into off-topic territory, but IMO this is not necessarily the case. I’ve read several poorly translated books (human translations, translating isn’t easy) and I often found something valuable that made me want to seek out the original. I see no reason why that can’t happen online, as long as the original is within easy reach.
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.