About a month ago I enabled Microsoft Translate as a source of suggested translations in Crowdin. I don’t really know if these translations are good, but I suspect they’re good enough and I’d like to turn on a feature that automatically translates all new strings using Microsoft Translate. Do transl…

I think the topic is just referring to Crowdin, which is a site where people can help with translating the user interface of the website and apps (not comments or taxon names), so I added that to the title to make it a bit clearer.

If you are on Chrome - you can highlight a word / phrase / paragraph then right click translate to English. Very easy on the same screen.

This would be a rather big change with the risk of hurting UX and alienating volunteers, therefore I recommend running a test first with a handful of languages. I definitely don’t recommend turning it on and auto-approving, as having a confusing string published is a much worse user experience than …

I appreciate all the input, everyone, especially from the folks doing translation work. Indeed, this is about translating the user interface text, like the word “Upload” in the upload button in the header on the website, not common names. The problem with auto-approval is that I kind of already do…

[image] kueda: I think I’ll try turning it on for the web project for a few languages this month and see how it goes. I’ll do some languages with lots of human attention (Hungarian, Danish, Russian, French) and some with very little but that might trigger some feedback (Afrikaans, Japanese, Kore…

This is only relevant to translators for now, which is a tiny fraction of overall users, so I think this post and this one on Crowdin will suffice for now. If we ever want to make a more general push for more translators, that might merit a blog post.

I am a translator for Japanese. I don’t think this will help much - in fact it might possibly increase my workload if someone approved those AI translations without correcting them properly. We have already translated pretty much everything that can be easily correctly translated by AI, and the unt…

Sounds good. I see that MT is already prefilled for Hungarian; I’ll gather my feedback and circle back. @kueda - can you remind me when you’re approving the unapproved translations? I want to make sure I approve HU before that.

I generally approve on the first US work day of the month, though I’ll be out of town at the end of April so I may not get to it until May 2 or May 5.

Should we turn on automatic translation on Crowdin?

General

DianaStuder April 2, 2025, 7:14pm 19

Can that expand into an iNat blog post? Very few read / see Forum posts.

Topic		Replies	Views
Kind of urgent! Regarding translation of the app interface and common names General android-app , ios-classic-app , translation	16	2424	August 15, 2019
Translators: what do you like & dislike about CrowdIn and TranslateWiki? General translation	16	1857	September 9, 2019
Moving Web Translations to Crowdin News and Updates	12	1567	October 9, 2019
Introduction to translation with Crowdin Tutorials translation	0	1248	June 13, 2021
Help me get started on Crowdin General	12	625	December 19, 2024

Should we turn on automatic translation on Crowdin?

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