Is it one million credits per day, or per month?
The post author (along with mods and admins) can actually edit the translations! In fact, we could turn on multilingual support independently of the automatic LLM-based translator, wherein all such translations are hand-written.
I asked this question on meta: Cómo se presentan las traducciones editadas manualmente - Translations - Discourse Meta… but I did it in Spanish and then edited the English. It doesn’t look like you can see that edit history or the fact that I’ve “blessed” the English, however.
So either you run the risk of overspending, or you risk a degraded user experience for those that rely on translation? Also who’s going to pay for this anyway. 1 million tokens doesn’t sound like a lot.
It’s a million tokens a day, and we’re posting tens of thousands of words per day. Of course words are not tokens, but it seems like we could keep up with translations at this budget. Backfilling the translations of the previously-posted 60 million words would take quite some time at that rate, however.
But anyone browsing the forum will consume tokens right? Since all of that will be translated as well. So you should look at the number of words read per day, not posted? On top of that, each post has to be individually translated for every requested langauge. So for sure the minimum is N_words * N_languages
No, the translations are translated once and then stored — that’s how you can edit them manually. They’re not translated as they’re read… it’s as they’re posted. And then the system can “backfill” (or not!) to some particular date(s) in batches.
Time to talk entirely in Julia, the solution to the 7000+ language problem.
I think this could be a cool feature. Kind of like a discourse babelfish. 
This seems like a good middle ground.
We can start, little by little! I’ve just enabled automatic translations to English, and only to English. Although it’s not immediately obvious at first glance, you should be able to start posting in practically any major language!
You can see how it works in this very post.
In topics with multilingual/translated posts (like mine above), you’ll now see a 
button at the top of the topic right-hand sidebar. This will allow you to configure your language preferences:
If you add Spanish to a language you understand (or untick translation), you’ll see my shoddy Spanish directly. You can also configure this in your interface preferences directly.
We may in the future add more supported languages (or turn this back off) but this seems like a great way to dip our toes in the water here. Let us know how it goes!
Do note that due to a Discourse limitation, you can’t directly declare your post’s language as you author it with the “Post language” selector — you just have to leave that unset and let the auto-detector detect it for you. You can change it later if it gets it wrong.
Wonderful!
Nice idea Matt!
xgddgsc – as Matt wrote, you can check languages you do understand those are not translated. Also not that his post above is actually in Spanish (besides the time is a small language symbol.
Ah I see and the editor also has that language symbol so one can set the language. Then I cannot (yet) mix languages mid post or mid sentence – yes every now and then I manage to do that in writing and speaking actually. With 3 languages I use nearly the same amount (maybe English a bit more than Norwegian (Bokmål) and German) my head is a bit brrrzzzt every now and then.
Again – nice idea, let’s see how that develops and might be used by others. I think I personally will stick to writing bad English, still.
Hm but I now noticed that I can only set the language here to indicate the post is English – I wanted to try this by posting something in Norwegian.
Oh. I found the button. So the interface language cannot be changed?
The language is detected automatically! Just write the post in Norwegian . I think we may be able to change some text to make it a bit more obvious.
There are three states once you hit post:
- The non-English transiently appears (and is emailed out)
- A Locale-detector agent identifies the locale and attaches it to the post. This is not currently possible for anyone to do manually, unfortunately (cf. Posting in a disabled language - #10 by awesomerobot - Feature - Discourse Meta)
- The Translator agent adds an English translation
Once the locale-detector sets a non-English locale on the post, then you can manually edit the translation (and even the detected locale) with the multilingual button on the post toolbar (hidden behind the …s).
I’m surprised. Icelandic is even more niche (400,000 speakers) and LLMs are getting rather good at translating from it (not as good at writing it or speaking). We’re only supporting translating to English, is that for sure a problem for Dutch (or Africans), or only in other direction?
Intriguing, could this be about bots, or most readers Chinese for sure?