# Should we enable automatic natural language translation here?

**URL:** <https://discourse.julialang.org/t/should-we-enable-automatic-natural-language-translation-here/139273>\
**Category:** Meta Discussion\
**Created:** [September 8, 2026, 3:05pm UTC](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/should-we-enable-automatic-natural-language-translation-here/139273 "2026-09-08T15:05:09Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 20\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![mbauman](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/julialang/user_avatar/discourse.julialang.org/mbauman/32/31082_2.png) [@mbauman](https://discourse.julialang.org/u/mbauman)\
**Post date:** [September 8, 2026, 3:05pm UTC](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/should-we-enable-automatic-natural-language-translation-here/139273/1 "2026-09-08T15:05:09Z")

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Continuing the discussion from [I don’t want to read LLM output](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/i-don-t-want-to-read-llm-output/139244/61):

> [@I don’t want to read LLM output](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/i-don-t-want-to-read-llm-output/139244/61):
>
> everybody has access to automated translation tools anyway.

We can do one better — we can turn on a plugin here that’d enable automated LLM-based translation for _everyone_. Could a few multilingual speakers head over to [meta.discourse.org](http://meta.discourse.org) and try out the language switcher? How good is it?

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**Author:** ![yamanori99](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/julialang/user_avatar/discourse.julialang.org/yamanori99/32/223465_2.png) [@yamanori99](https://discourse.julialang.org/u/yamanori99)\
**Post date:** [September 8, 2026, 3:35pm UTC](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/should-we-enable-automatic-natural-language-translation-here/139273/2 "2026-09-08T15:35:51Z")

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At least for my native language, Japanese, it looks reasonably usable at first glance. More readable, actually, than the auto-translation on Reddit or X. Haven’t tried it yet on posts with Julia-specific terms or code, so no idea how it handles those. How about other languages, though?

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**Author:** ![kahliburke](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/julialang/user_avatar/discourse.julialang.org/kahliburke/32/208472_2.png) [@kahliburke](https://discourse.julialang.org/u/kahliburke)\
**Post date:** [September 8, 2026, 3:40pm UTC](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/should-we-enable-automatic-natural-language-translation-here/139273/3 "2026-09-08T15:40:02Z")

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This post was temporarily hidden by the community for possibly being off-topic, unfocused, inappropriate, or spammy.

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**Author:** ![kellertuer](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/julialang/user_avatar/discourse.julialang.org/kellertuer/32/220707_2.png) [@kellertuer](https://discourse.julialang.org/u/kellertuer)\
**Post date:** [September 8, 2026, 3:40pm UTC](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/should-we-enable-automatic-natural-language-translation-here/139273/4 "2026-09-08T15:40:49Z")

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I find the idea interesting, but I think for the example you posted I would have to register there? Saw the announcement but I do not speak/read Japanese, so the gif they post does not help me.

I think posting the text below in another language is something we could activate here and users can use it if they like to? I personally would prefer to have the forum in a single language as I explain over on the other Meta thread you link.

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**Author:** ![slwu89](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/julialang/user_avatar/discourse.julialang.org/slwu89/32/217323_2.png) [@slwu89](https://discourse.julialang.org/u/slwu89)\
**Post date:** [September 8, 2026, 3:40pm UTC](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/should-we-enable-automatic-natural-language-translation-here/139273/5 "2026-09-08T15:40:54Z")

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Just my .02 cents speaking multiple languages often, I’d rather have translation be “opt-in” rather than “on by default, opt-out by user”.

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**Author:** ![mbauman](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/julialang/user_avatar/discourse.julialang.org/mbauman/32/31082_2.png) [@mbauman](https://discourse.julialang.org/u/mbauman)\
**Post date:** [September 8, 2026, 4:03pm UTC](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/should-we-enable-automatic-natural-language-translation-here/139273/6 "2026-09-08T16:03:03Z")

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The way this plugin works is that you can choose your “interface” language with the top-right dropdown. All posts (as well as all the UI elements) are translated into this language (if necessary).

When someone posts something in a different language, it looks like this: [Swipe pour le chat - Feature - Discourse Meta](https://meta.discourse.org/t/swipe-pour-le-chat/411449) — there’s a little multi-lingual button that says it was translated from French.

 ![image](https://global.discourse-cdn.com/julialang/original/3X/7/e/7e3b460017ada409b9e843922fddaac4a68f9465.png)

And then every user would get this preference to opt-out of automatic translation for some subset of languages or entirely:

 ![image](https://global.discourse-cdn.com/julialang/original/3X/c/c/cc650d0e806c3e455152ccc2bd30037452869ec8.png)

Obviously, once we start automatically translating posts into non-English automatically, we’d start getting posts authored in non-English.

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<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![kellertuer](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/julialang/user_avatar/discourse.julialang.org/kellertuer/32/220707_2.png) [@kellertuer](https://discourse.julialang.org/u/kellertuer)\
**Post date:** [September 8, 2026, 4:06pm UTC](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/should-we-enable-automatic-natural-language-translation-here/139273/7 "2026-09-08T16:06:13Z")

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Thanks – that helps and I found it, suddenly the whole discourse even was German 😱

I think as a global setup that would be too annoying for me. As a small option for single posts – I think it is ok, and I still would probably not use it, since my brain switches languages, so then I would prefer to stay in a single language myself.

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**Author:** ![dilumaluthge](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/julialang/user_avatar/discourse.julialang.org/dilumaluthge/32/29283_2.png) [@dilumaluthge](https://discourse.julialang.org/u/dilumaluthge)\
**Post date:** [September 8, 2026, 4:08pm UTC](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/should-we-enable-automatic-natural-language-translation-here/139273/8 "2026-09-08T16:08:01Z")

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Is there a financial cost associated with this plugin? E.g. will the JuliaLang project have to pay for this?

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<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![mbauman](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/julialang/user_avatar/discourse.julialang.org/mbauman/32/31082_2.png) [@mbauman](https://discourse.julialang.org/u/mbauman)\
**Post date:** [September 8, 2026, 4:11pm UTC](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/should-we-enable-automatic-natural-language-translation-here/139273/9 "2026-09-08T16:11:44Z")

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Yes, but it might be included? We have “1 million credits” that we can use as part of our current plan, but I have no idea what that means or how far it’d go with translation. It does save the translations, so it’s O(languages\*posts), not O(views).

 ![image](https://global.discourse-cdn.com/julialang/original/3X/7/c/7c7a67ec3534e2149d13dd0052cb8c4c3a0653c5.png)

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<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![dilumaluthge](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/julialang/user_avatar/discourse.julialang.org/dilumaluthge/32/29283_2.png) [@dilumaluthge](https://discourse.julialang.org/u/dilumaluthge)\
**Post date:** [September 8, 2026, 4:18pm UTC](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/should-we-enable-automatic-natural-language-translation-here/139273/10 "2026-09-08T16:18:50Z")

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> [@slwu89](#):
>
> Just my .02 cents speaking multiple languages often, I’d rather have translation be “opt-in” rather than “on by default, opt-out by user”.

I think it would be nice to make this opt-in, at least initially.

> [@mbauman](#):
>
> And then every user would get this preference to opt-out of automatic translation for some subset of languages or entirely:

So this makes it sound like it would be opt-out. Could we make it opt-in initially, and do a trial run to see how things go?

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**Author:** ![langestefan](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/julialang/user_avatar/discourse.julialang.org/langestefan/32/207923_2.png) [@langestefan](https://discourse.julialang.org/u/langestefan)\
**Post date:** [September 8, 2026, 4:24pm UTC](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/should-we-enable-automatic-natural-language-translation-here/139273/11 "2026-09-08T16:24:09Z")

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Dutch being kind of a niche language, any automatic translation tends to be cringe worthy to the point I get so annoyed by it I set all my software to English by default. I will assume other niche languages have the same issue. Discourse only supports translating a handful of languages anyway looking at the drop down menu. Ofcourse I don’t have any issue with improving the accessibility of the julia discourse. I do think the discourse itself needs to stay English-only though.

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<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![mbauman](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/julialang/user_avatar/discourse.julialang.org/mbauman/32/31082_2.png) [@mbauman](https://discourse.julialang.org/u/mbauman)\
**Post date:** [September 8, 2026, 4:28pm UTC](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/should-we-enable-automatic-natural-language-translation-here/139273/12 "2026-09-08T16:28:47Z")

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> [@langestefan](#):
>
> Discourse only supports translating a handful of languages anyway looking at the drop down menu.

This is configurable on a site-by-site basis, but of course the costs (or credit usage) will scale by the number of languages. We can choose to support up to five languages on our plan here — and have leeway to choose out of two dozen or so.

> **Supported languages**
>
> - Arabic (اللغة العربية)
> - Belarusian (беларуская мова)
> - Bulgarian (български език)
> - Bosnian (bosanski jezik)
> - Catalan (català)
> - Czech (čeština)
> - Danish (dansk)
> - German (Deutsch)
> - Greek (ελληνικά)
> - English
> - English (UK)
> - Spanish (Español)
> - Estonian (eesti)
> - Persian (فارسی)
> - Finnish (suomi)
> - French (Français)
> - Galician (galego)
> - Hebrew (עברית)
> - Croatian (hrvatski jezik)
> - Hungarian (magyar)
> - Armenian (Հայերեն)
> - Indonesian
> - Italian (Italiano)
> - Japanese (日本語)
> - Korean (한국어)
> - Lithuanian (lietuvių kalba)
> - Latvian (latviešu valoda)
> - Norwegian Bokmål (Norsk bokmål)
> - Dutch (Nederlands)
> - Polish (polski)
> - Portuguese (Português)
> - Portuguese (Português (BR))
> - Romanian (limba română)
> - Russian (Русский)
> - Slovak (slovenčina)
> - Slovene (slovenščina)
> - Albanian (Shqip)
> - Serbian (српски језик)
> - Swedish (svenska)
> - Swahili (Kiswahili)
> - Telugu (తెలుగు)
> - Thai (ไทย)
> - Turkish (Türkçe)
> - Uyghur (ئۇيغۇرچە)
> - Ukrainian (українська мова)
> - Urdu (اردو)
> - Vietnamese (tiếng Việt)
> - Chinese Simplified (简体中文)
> - Chinese (繁體中文)

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<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![nifets](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/julialang/user_avatar/discourse.julialang.org/nifets/32/220548_2.png) [@nifets](https://discourse.julialang.org/u/nifets)\
**Post date:** [September 8, 2026, 4:31pm UTC](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/should-we-enable-automatic-natural-language-translation-here/139273/13 "2026-09-08T16:31:34Z")

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Is there a point to this given that most browsers handle translation out of the box with many extensions like DeepL available as well?

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**Author:** ![yamanori99](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/julialang/user_avatar/discourse.julialang.org/yamanori99/32/223465_2.png) [@yamanori99](https://discourse.julialang.org/u/yamanori99)\
**Post date:** [September 8, 2026, 4:37pm UTC](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/should-we-enable-automatic-natural-language-translation-here/139273/14 "2026-09-08T16:37:30Z")

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I already occasionally use the browser’s built-in translation on Julia Discourse, and it often doesn’t work well. Some messages just don’t get translated, and the behavior feels pretty inconsistent overall. (Firefox, Safari)

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<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![mbauman](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/julialang/user_avatar/discourse.julialang.org/mbauman/32/31082_2.png) [@mbauman](https://discourse.julialang.org/u/mbauman)\
**Post date:** [September 8, 2026, 4:48pm UTC](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/should-we-enable-automatic-natural-language-translation-here/139273/15 "2026-09-08T16:48:25Z")

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I think the biggest advantage over browser-based translation is that it works on a per-post basis and would allow folks to post in their native language directly.

That’s also why don’t think “opt-in” really makes much sense — once we start _natively_ serving discourse in other languages, we’re also signaling that we accept those languages as posts! And so then we’ve unilaterally opted _everyone_ into seeing those non-English posts… the only option is whether they get automatically translated back to English or not.

And, yeah, I’d like to get a sense on how far these credits would go. We can choose how (and how aggressively) we “backfill” translations…

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<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![dilumaluthge](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/julialang/user_avatar/discourse.julialang.org/dilumaluthge/32/29283_2.png) [@dilumaluthge](https://discourse.julialang.org/u/dilumaluthge)\
**Post date:** [September 8, 2026, 4:54pm UTC](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/should-we-enable-automatic-natural-language-translation-here/139273/16 "2026-09-08T16:54:22Z")

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> [@mbauman](#):
>
> Yes, but it might be included? We have “1 million credits” that we can use as part of our current plan, but I have no idea what that means or how far it’d go with translation.

I’m also curious to know: What happens if we run out of credits? Does it stop doing translations? Or do we rack up a bill that we then have to pay? I don’t want to get a massive surprise bill at the end of the month.

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<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![dilumaluthge](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/julialang/user_avatar/discourse.julialang.org/dilumaluthge/32/29283_2.png) [@dilumaluthge](https://discourse.julialang.org/u/dilumaluthge)\
**Post date:** [September 8, 2026, 4:56pm UTC](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/should-we-enable-automatic-natural-language-translation-here/139273/17 "2026-09-08T16:56:48Z")

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~~Anyway, with all the caveats I wrote above, I think this could be a good idea, and it would be nice to try it out in some kind of opt-in trial.~~

* * *

EDIT:

> [@mbauman](#):
>
> That’s also why don’t think “opt-in” really makes much sense — once we start _natively_ serving discourse in other languages, we’re also signaling that we accept those languages as posts! And so then we’ve unilaterally opted _everyone_ into seeing those non-English posts… the only option is whether they get automatically translated back to English or not.

Ah, that’s a good point. It’s not really easy to do an opt-in trial.

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<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![mbauman](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/julialang/user_avatar/discourse.julialang.org/mbauman/32/31082_2.png) [@mbauman](https://discourse.julialang.org/u/mbauman)\
**Post date:** [September 8, 2026, 5:17pm UTC](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/should-we-enable-automatic-natural-language-translation-here/139273/18 "2026-09-08T17:17:29Z")

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Some more details are here:

> **[Content Localization - Manual and Automatic with Discourse AI](https://meta.discourse.org/t/content-localization-manual-and-automatic-with-discourse-ai/370969)**
>
> In this topic, we will walk you through the Content Localization features and how to enable them. The features are split into two parts: What is available by default in Discourse; and Discourse AI for automatic translations. ⚠ For quick access to...

Basically nobody has set their [interface locale](https://discourse.julialang.org/my/preferences/interface) that they suggest we check, but we can just see what their browser reports. Over the past 36 hours (these logs aren’t stored for long):

| language | pageviews |
| --- | --- |
| zh | 51427 |
| en | 25493 |
| de | 1173 |
| fr | 1002 |
| it | 313 |
| es | 309 |
| ja | 299 |
| nl | 249 |
| ru | 209 |
| pt | 202 |
| nb | 142 |
| … | … |

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<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![dilumaluthge](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/julialang/user_avatar/discourse.julialang.org/dilumaluthge/32/29283_2.png) [@dilumaluthge](https://discourse.julialang.org/u/dilumaluthge)\
**Post date:** [September 8, 2026, 5:58pm UTC](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/should-we-enable-automatic-natural-language-translation-here/139273/19 "2026-09-08T17:58:54Z")

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> [@mbauman](#):
>
> We have “1 million credits” that we can use as part of our current plan, but I have no idea what that means or how far it’d go with translation.

[This comment on Meta](https://meta.discourse.org/t/unlock-all-discourse-ai-features-with-our-hosted-llm/390985/7) says that one “credit” = one token.

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<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![dilumaluthge](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/julialang/user_avatar/discourse.julialang.org/dilumaluthge/32/29283_2.png) [@dilumaluthge](https://discourse.julialang.org/u/dilumaluthge)\
**Post date:** [September 8, 2026, 6:01pm UTC](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/should-we-enable-automatic-natural-language-translation-here/139273/20 "2026-09-08T18:01:29Z")

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> [@dilumaluthge](#):
>
> I’m also curious to know: What happens if we run out of credits? Does it stop doing translations? Or do we rack up a bill that we then have to pay?

I think my question is answered by this post on Meta: [Running Out of AI credits? Available Options and Next Steps - Hosted Customers - Discourse Meta](https://meta.discourse.org/t/running-out-of-ai-credits-available-options-and-next-steps/389109)

Basically, AI features stop until our credits reset.

[Next page](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/should-we-enable-automatic-natural-language-translation-here/139273.md?page=2)