AI-generated tag translations do not work perfectly

Moin
Mon, 30 Mar 2026 15:24:15 +0000
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When scrolling through the German tag translations, I noticed a range of issues that seem to stem from the AI lacking context - it treats tags as isolated words rather than references to specific Discourse features, plugins, or components.

Note: German nouns are always capitalised, but tags on meta are lowercase. The translations in this post are therefore inconsistently capitalised - I kept slipping into correct German capitalisation out of habit.

The fun part first

Before getting into the practical problems, some translations are just entertaining:

composer → “Komponist” - This is the person writing music

auto-bump → “automatische-erhöhung” - “automatic increase”

fully-theme → “vollständig-thematisiert” - “fully addressed”

raspberry-pi → “Himbeere-pi” (“raspberry” as in the fruit)

post-voting → “nach-der-Abstimmung” - “after the vote” (“post” read as the Latin prefix, not as a forum post)

tablet → “Tablette” - “pill” (the medication, not the device)

Same translation for different tags

This is the most impactful problem in practice. When two tags get the same translation, they lose their ability to distinguish topics from each other.

year-in-review & yearly-review → “Jahresrückblick” - Currently the plugin name seems to be not-translatable (I see the English name in the admin sidebar and in the list of installed plugins), so it’s likely you would use the English term to refer to the plugin’s name. Though I hope some day all plugins have translated names so I think I would add “Metas” to the one grouping the yearly review topics on here to separate those, so it’s “Metas-Jahresrückblick” (meta’s year in review)

surveys & polls → “Umfragen” - I think the translations of both plugins are the same too and so far no one noticed. I need to think more about a good solution for this one because it can also easily conflict with “voting”

docs & documentation → “Dokumentation” - Just like yearly-review docs hasn’t been translated to German so I would not translate the tag (In this case a translation in the future seems very unlikely)

how-to & tutorial → “Anleitung” - This one has already been fixed. I found this translation of https://diataxis.fr/ and suggested the term[1] used there)

Proper nouns and product names that shouldn’t be translated

Some tags refer to specific tools, frameworks, or products. Translating them makes the feature unrecognisable.

raspberry-pi → “Himbeere-pi” (“raspberry” as in the fruit)

mermaid → “Meerjungfrau” (“mermaid” as in the mythological creature, not the diagramming tool)

ember → “Glut” (glowing embers from a fire)

vanilla → “Vanille” (the flavour)

onebox → “einzige-box” - “only box”

intercom → “Gegensprechanlage” (an intercom as in a door buzzer - though intercom-widget was translated fine)

passkey → “Passwort” - “password” (a passkey is specifically not a password)

perspective-api → “Perspektiven-api”

backups → “Sicherungen”

design-experiment → “Experimententwurf” - can be “design-experiment” but also “draft experiment”, I would think of the latter because for the first I’d have kept “design” and talking about drafts is quite common in Discourse.

Translations of “Discourse”

Most tags referring to “Discourse” were translated so they no longer include the name of the software. One exception is discourse-hub .

discourseconnect → “Diskursverbindung”

ask-discourse → “Fragen-Diskurs” - “discussion of questions”

discourse-discover → “Diskurs-Entdeckung”

“Theme” consistently mistranslated as “Thema” (topic)

This is a systematic problem across all theme-related tags. In German, both “theme” and “topic” translate to Thema, but in a Discourse context these are very different things. This makes theme tags read as if they’re about specific discussion topics.

theme-welcome → “Willkommens-Thema” (reads like “welcome topic”, as in the default pinned welcome thread)

theme-creator → “Themenersteller” - “topic creator”

horizon-theme → “Horizont-Thema”

meta-theme-feedback → “Meta-Themen-Feedback”

foundation-theme → same pattern

fully-theme → “vollständig-thematisiert” - “fully addressed”

This affects all tags in the Official Themes group.

Translations where context was missing

composer → “Komponist” - This is the person writing music, compared to the input field which we usually call “Editor” in German.

tablet → “Tablette” - “pill” or “tablet”.

copy-post → "kopierbeitrag” - “copying fee” (The problem is the combinations of the words. “Beitrag” for post is correct, but because copy wasn’t translated as a verb it reads like Beitrag would be used in the meaning of fee here)

Noun or verb

Some features were translated as verbs instead of nouns

chat → “plaudern” - “to chat”

search → “suchen” - “to search”

“post” read as the Latin prefix, not as a forum post

post-voting → “nach-der-Abstimmung” - “after the vote”

post-badges → “nach-Abzeichen” - “after-badges”

Results from not that clear English tags

hosted-support → “gehosteter-support” (This reads like support being hosted instead of support for hosted customers)

Abbreviation

pm-dropdown (same in German) without context m (message) was not replaced with n (Nachricht)

Translations that don’t match Discourse’s own interface terminology

These translations are technically correct German, but Discourse’s own UI uses different terms. This makes tags harder to find intuitively, especially for users who navigate by the interface language.

impersonate → “nachahmen” - “imitate” (but the interface uses Nutzersicht or Nutzerrolle)

staged-users → “Staging-Benutzer” (but the interface says vorbereitete Benutzer)

advertising → “Werbung” (but the interface refers to Anzeigen)

assign → “zuweisen” (but the plugin translation uses zuordnen)

hot-topics → “Top-Themen” (this was translated as “top topics”, which is actually a different list in Discourse)

read-only → “nur lesbar”

bootstrap-mode → “Bootstrap-Modus” (but translators originally chose Starthilfemodus)

post-notices → “Nachrichten” - “messages/news” (can be misleading because messages are a different feature, “official notice” uses Mitteilung in the interface)

about-page → “über-Seite” (This is a literal translation. But usually the German translation is something like “about us page”. Über does not only mean about but also above.)

auto-bump → “automatische-erhöhung” - “automatic increase”

tags → “Etiketten” (but tag-groups and most tags containing tag use “tag”, the term used on Crowdin is Schlagwort)

Truncated translations

This is a different kind of problem - not a translation error, but a consequence of German compound nouns being significantly longer than their English equivalents, combined with the tag character limit.

content-security-policy → “inhalts-sicherheitsrichtl” (cut off, should be inhalts-sicherheitsrichtlinie)

ai-custom-prompt → “ai-benutzerdefinierte-auf” (cut off mid-word, should be ai-benutzerdefinierte-aufforderung)

custom-category-boxes → “benutzerdefinierte-katego” (cut off mid-word, should be benutzerdefinierte-kategorie-boxen, in this case box is missing entirely from the translation)

Tags containing “custom” easily get too long because “benutzerdefiniert” is quite a long word.
more examples (click for more details)
These examples suggest the translation process needs more context - ideally knowing which plugin or feature a tag belongs to, and having access to existing Discourse interface translations as a reference. Happy to hear if others have noticed similar patterns in other languages.

@nat (upon personal request)

1. Lernunterlagen ↩︎

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