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Comment by xorcist | Hacker News Reader

Much more importantly: Never ever auto-translate content to the user's language.

Present what languages you actually have the data in. The user is smart enough to click the "translate" button in the web browser should they want. That translation is also likely to be better quality.

English is not my first language. Or my second. But I understand it well enough to work in it every day. And I never ever want to wade through auto-translated garbage just to find the right button to read the original English version. Because for some reason this is only a problem for English, web sites using other locales never do it, which should be indication enough that international visitors hate it.

If you ever think about using machine translation tools for you web site, first you must do a full translation round trip for every language before publishing. Translate, paste back the result and translate back. That is roughly what you intended to publish. Don't do it.

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I hate reddit because it auto-translates to French and users have a specific style that would be hard or impossible to really human-translate anyway. Even if I didn't speak English the translated content would not be worth it.

The feature to change the language or show original content is hard to find and it depends on wether it's the app or mobile web or desktop web.

They also try too hard to make us download the app but that's an other issue.

Machine translation has been good enough for a few years, that even native speakers don't notice it.

If done with SOTA LLMs, yes, depending on the language (although even then I would dispute the "even native speakers don't notice it" part).

But SOTA LLMs cost money, so what you usually get in practice for auto-translation at scale (like YouTube) is around Google Translate level, which is hardly good enough.

I don't know what level you consider DeepL or Kagi Translate, but those two can translate at a level which is indistinguishable from a native speaker.

These types of statements are hard to take seriously. Those tools are remarkably good for what they are, and the fact that they can help me understand texts in foreign languages is amazing. But indistinguishable from a professional native translator (which I take it you mean, being a language native is not enough to be a translator) is something else entirely.

If you really believe that, why not recruit a professional, do a blinded study, and if it's really industinguishable you can probably get a nice publication somewhere. AI companies are flush with cash and will not think twice about sponsoring such a study.

I use these DeepL and Kagi Translate to sell products and do complicated deals with people whose language I don't understand. None of them have ever said anything to indicate that the writing is sub-par, and we sometimes have very long e-mail chains to iron out details.

I have in fact had professional translators look extensively at AI translated material, and their verdict was that the translations are perfectly fine but maybe that the AI sometimes expresses itself in a funny or strange way. Well, that's what people do as well.

Maybe it's not indistinguishable from native, but it's indistinguishable from a person who is fluent in the language, and that's the only thing which matters. Because the purpose is to communicate.

The trick is to first write in your native language in a way that is extremely clear and devoid of any risks of the receiver misunderstanding any part. This works best, whether the reader is another human or an AI translator.

This is emphatically not true in case of DeepL in my experience. I haven't tried Kagi but I wouldn't be surprised if they are using the same LLM that powers their assistant for it.

Also, this kind of claim is meaningless unless you specify the language being translated, because quality varies widely depending on that, even across popular languages, never mind small regional ones. If you try to translate, say, to Chechen using GPT-o3 or Gemini 2.5 Pro, don't expect that translation to be accurate or even grammatically correct.

Which makes it soo much worse, actually.

I often go through a few sentences or even entire paragraphs before stumbling onto something that doesn't make sense. And then I have to go back and reread everything.

Microsoft documentation is the worst offender. Their "some parts were translated automatically" notice is hard to, well, notice. And their translation is great! — until it doesn't work, because UI has different translation.

How would it be better if you couldn't read it or write it?

The whole point is that in many cases we can read the original language just fine and have our browser set up accordingly, but these companies think they know better.

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