I think it’s changing a bit in recent years with LLMs. You can come across examples of native speakers rating LLMs translations as surprisingly natural sounding, although usually the best examples are in something like Spanish or French as opposed to Chinese.
So basically I wouldn’t rule out non-human translations like you might with Google translate 10 years ago, and progress can improve drastically over short time periods nowadays.
I think that’s also where people are drawing a line of standard that’s just too high for whats needed.
If all the source material is English, and it’s being translated to other languages then I would say we don’t need the machine translation to capture some poetic nuance. As a first approximation it just has to convey the meaning and sentiment correctly.
If someone wrote “black is favourable here as the position is a solid as the Great Wall” and it was translated to ここに黒はいいです, that’s “good enough” as far as I would be concerned. Unless the sentence or paragraph goes into specifics, it’s probably not worth trying to idiom match to make it seem more natural or distinguish between adjectives that are functionally the same.
Multiple source languages and separate text pools can cause a lot of issues though.
You don’t want to have to check 50 languages to see which version of the OJE has the best explanation in this position, and then check it again for the next move in the position.
There’s an example I’ve encountered on another website called boardgamearena where wikis are completely separate and unrelated in different languages and so one language will have one sentence
and another will have whole paragraphs of tips and strategy
and
There’s very little incentive to translate these types of things to another language, even though they might be tips from very strong players in those games.
The author themselves might not speak many of the languages that site offers wiki pages for.
It’s basically not a great all round experience to have say French players have little to no help available, and English players well written guides. There’s also no indication that these things exist, because only your language is shown to you.
You’d have to be aware in the first place that other versions of the wiki exist, and then have to search through all other languages to see if there’s something better available as help.
You’re not as worried with these kinds of issues when the project is at a huge scale like Wikipedia, there’s enough interest and sources in many languages that somebody will probably contribute something. Or for more popular games, there’s guides and videos in that language that can populate the area.
It’s the more niche areas of abstract games, where you or someone wants to encourage more people to play but there’s little to no resources for players in that language where some kinds of machine translation become useful and scalable.
I think this is a very valid point, and being able to tag a position with multiple sources could be useful. For instance I think at the moment each position is just showing one resource reference? It could point to multiple sources, and having that to be different for each language might not be a bad idea, unless it’s very conflicting. Imagine player A says this move is good and player B says it’s a big blunder.
In some cases though, maybe OJE is not even the best project for this kind of stuff. Maybe something like
could be better at collecting many videos in multiple languages for each topic in Go.