This choice is understandable, considering that you previously thought that the translations were almost perfect. But now that there is evidence to the contrary, maybe it is time to reconsider. I will provide some more arguments.
First of all, there is the general question of whether you want a truly multilingual Joseki Explorer, or simply a translated Joseki Explorer. If we stick with machine translations, there will always be texts that are slightly off (and some that are even terribly wrong). Of course, with enough context provided by continuous community feedback, the machine-translated explanations of the most common positions should be fine. But explanations written by humans will always be a better experience.
Why? While words can be translated, often there is no 1:1 correspondence between an English word and a non-English word. Moreover, speakers of other languages structure their sentences differently. A human native speaker can easily differentiate between the structure of a text and its meaning, and is able to explain a Joseki position in a way that is both correct (using the English text as reference) and natural. A machine will either stick as closely to the structure of the English text (to keep the explanation correct), or unknowingly alter the meaning (by trying to make the text look natural).
I understand that this may be hard to grasp if you don’t speak a foreign language (especially not one that is very different from English). But in many cases, non-human translations simply do not feel natural.
I’m not sure if there is a way to prove this besides showing you examples of failed translations. But I can’t imagine that you will ever be able to provide enough context that covers every position, especially if the English texts are changing constantly. Keep in mind that natural-sounding language is much harder to achieve than just correct language.
Even if this is the case, consider that machine translations also fail for languages like German and French, which are closely related to English (see Do not use (unverified) machine translations for examples). The problem is simple: Language models do not understand the text that they are translating, so they will make mistakes.
Beyond correctness and “naturalness” of the Joseki explanations, there may be more reasons to allow different text pools. For example, the text in another language may use an analogy to explain a position that simply doesn’t make sense in English (e.g. a reference to the joseki’s name). Or there might be great resources, like articles or YouTube videos, that explain a position in a non-English language. Currently, there is no way to include such useful information for users who speak other languages.
Finally, here is my suggestion for how the Joseki Explorer could look like for non-English users (influenced also by the discussions in previous threads):
- If there is an explanation written in the user’s language, show it at the top. Below, show the original English text with the option to auto-translate it.
- Both versions of the explanation should have a timestamp (I imagine this to be useful in general, also for English users, to judge whether an explanation is up-to-date). If the timestamp of the non-English text is older than that of the English text, show a small warning that the explanation might be outdated.
- If there is no explanation in the user’s language, show only the original English text with the option to auto-translate it.
- If there is no explanation in the user’s language, show an option to help with the translations.
I strongly encourage you to at least consider hiding the machine-translated text behind a button press, or showing it below the English original. This would already look less “amateurish” than the current situation.
If you really don’t want users to make an additional button press for the translation, at least show a small warning that the text is machine-translated.