As a German user, it is very clear that the new “Play” page has been automatically translated from English because of several obvious mistranslations. For example:
“Play Computer/Human” are translated as “Computer/Mensch spielen”. In German, this sounds more like “play as a human/computer” instead of “play against a human/computer”.
Disabled handicap explanation: “Disabled: Disable handicaps” is translated as “Behinderte: Behinderungen deaktivieren”. This literally means: “Disabled people: deactivate disabilities”.
Of course, most German speakers would probably understand what this is supposed to mean unless they’re very unfamiliar with how the game of Go works. However, this does not make a good first impression to new users, basically counteracting the simplified and more inviting layout.
Another place where the machine translations are painfully obvious is the Joseki explorer. I find myself reading the original English text more often than the German translation.
I’m sure that similar mistakes happen with other languages. And while I understand the want to make OGS more inviting by supporting many languages, I do not think that machine translations are a good solution. My suggestions would be:
Use the original English text if something has not yet been translated by a human. At least for the languages with a large community on OGS that can help translating, community translations should be available reasonably quickly.
The machine translations could be used as “suggested translations” on the community translation site instead.
Make the original text more prominent than the translation in the Joseki explorer.
I have since of course submitted correct translations for the errors that I spotted on the “Play” page. Are community translations available for the Joseki explorer as well? If so, at least I couldn’t find them.
Sometimes you get a notification about helping with the translations, but otherwise the link is indeed well hidden. Maybe it could be added under “Community” in the top menu of OGS?
We are indeed experimenting with supplementing the human translation with AI.
There are two ways this happens:
A new phrase is introduced that does not yet have a human translation. We substitute an AI translation instead, while waiting for the human translation.
A new phrase is introduced that is expected to be unstable. We don’t even ask for a human transation, we just use the AI one, because we don’t want to churn the human translations.
The “context” that the AI translation gets is currently pretty minimal, so it’s helpful to know ones that don’t work well: we’d like to add context to make it work well.
OJE is more tricky because the “descriptions” in it are not supplied “by us, as part of OGS code” they are “edited live by other users”. This makes them much less amenable to the human translation system. In fact, we can’t even feed them into human translation as things stand.
Instead we already do what you suggested: provide the original english as well. I don’t think we can do better in the short term (and I’d imagined that it’s obvious enough that the translation is AI that we didn’t need to say that explicitly )
FYI this is a “current and hot topic”, and @anoek did recently comment along the lines of “we’ve outgrown our current translation system” hinting that a whole new thing may be needed.
It became “hot” with the introduction of Community Moderation, which brought with it a lot of long and unstable phrases. Most “Community Moderation” phrases users will see are AI translated, for this reason. The Community Moderators are actively working on improving the translation context.
The first thing I noticed when I was following up on you observation is that there don’t appear to be any instructions for how to use this translation thingo.
We could seriously do with that I think - I put a place holder in the documentation for this.
(Handicapés = disabled/handicapped (like a person who is handicapped, here odd-looking in the plural too),
ironically also easy to interpret as the opposite of the original source English (handicap option disabled) even if one tries to somehow piece its meaning together (‘Oh, it’s a … handicapped game ?’) )
In general, the autotranslations seem to have a lot of errors, it may be better even to just leave as English until human verified/translated, as a fair number don’t make sense in French or becoome worse/more confusing with the auto-translate shifting them from time to time
First, let me say that I appreciate your effort and this includes experiments like the AI translation, even if I don’t like the result.
This seems like a tricky problem. But I would still suggest making a change here (at least in the long term). If descriptions can change constantly, then of course, it would be impossible to have the same text for every language after every change without AI translations.
But it is probably not necessary to reflect every change to the English description in every language (especially if only wording is changed, but fundamentally the position is evaluated in the same way). And human translators would be able to explain the intention behind certain moves much better than the AI translation.
Even with human translations, the English text could still be shown (at least if it has been updated more recently than the translation). Timestamps for the descriptions would also be useful to judge whether the information is still up to date.
Perhaps I should have been more clear about what my problem. It is not that it is not obvious enough that AI has been used (quite the opposite, actually) or that I can’t find the information I’m looking for. My problem here is that the (possibly incorrect) AI translation is more prominent above the original text:
A bad AI translation leaves a worse first impression than not having a translation at all (at least in my opinion).
I want to look at the correct information first. Only if I don’t understand the English phrasing, I would look at the AI translation.
New players wanting to learn could learn wrong “Go vocabulary” this way, because Go terminology is often translated incorrectly.
I think that this could be improved even in the short term. If the description has not been translated by a human, then provide the original English text on top and maybe even hide the AI translation behind a button (something like “Show AI translation”) or remove it alltogether.
I’m not sure how many users rely on the AI translations. But for those who do, 3rd party services like Google Translate provide the same translation quality. Most browsers should be able to automatically translate websites anyway (at least with addons), so I don’t really see a large benefit of OGS providing bad AI translations.
I think gpt5 or gpt6 would be able to automatically translate any site perfectly. But it needs to see full context. If you will show each button separately to someone, he will not understand what that button is for. Translator needs to see all buttons at the same time to understand what they are for.
I’ve noticed this too – for example, the French autotranslation often translates “ladder” into “échelle” when the proper Go term should be “escalier”, or just the Japanese “shicho”, which has led to some DDK players using it, although –
— it is easier for me to read in French, sometimes much more quickly/easily even though I can understand the English, even with the slight translation issues, and I imagine it’d be the case for those not fluid or comfortable with English for whatever reasons too, so just showing it below may be easier than hiding or removing it entirely.
(or hiding it in an expanding menu indicated “autotranslation” ?)
(navigating to Google Translate takes extra steps and time, so I do appreciate the possibility of reading something translated fairly easily – for the most part, the OJE auto-translations are comprehensible to me, too.)
( – apart from that, I’m also used to seeing silly French autotranslations and some people probably are used to this also if using autotranslation for anything frequently, so sometimes it’s more amusing to me at the quality level the OJE manages (a bit higher than other autotranslations in the site for some reason), though I can also see how it can provide a bad impression and I also find that sometimes when the translation is really poor)
On the other hand, the OJE is fairly static, so we could in theory submit it for human verification/translation ?
I think AI translation is worth keeping as part of the site. Of course, not all people can speak English (even a bit).
But I agree, making the translation secondary would be consistent with how most sites handle user-generated content translation (either via “Show translation” button or making the translated text more stylistically understated). Somewhat related, this was something I suggested during discussion of chat translation:
Yes - but only “in theory”. In practice, we have no current means to submit “phrases that users change” into the human translation system.
The reason for this is that the human translation system sucks the “phrases to be translated” out of code that the developers wrote. The phrases that uses submit are not there.
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