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Comment by alightsoul | Hacker News Reader

Proposal A is the end of debian for non-english speakers. For those who don't speak english which is most of the world, using an LLM has become vital, because technical information is not available in their language or is extremely basic. Arch Linux is far more lenient with this.

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Un what? There’s several friendly clauses among these proposals including

> 8. Any contributor who feels they cannot write in English without assistance, may write in their native language, and expect readers to use translation tools of their choice. In that case a human-written English summary would be very welcome but is not required. In any case we promise not to shame anyone for any linguistic mistakes.

That is Proposal C, not Proposal A. (Although I do think Proposal A as written also does not forbid translation usage to communicate.)

this doesn't prevent you from reading documentation in whatever language you like. If you're saying this is the end of someone communicating with you through an LLM despite not speaking the language, that should never happen and I've never been in any technical organization where that was considered appropriate, if you want to work in international software projects you need to have at least a functional grasp of English

most documentation is not translated to spanish, for example. working on international projects is the exception, not the rule. Spanish speakers just use LLMs because searching on google in spanish yields no results, because the info they need is in english so google doesn't show it to spanish speakers or by searching it in spanish. Spanish speakers have their search result language set to spanish by default based on IP location and most never change it to english, where the results are far more detailed, and then they almost never search in english.

and they still can do this. Again nobody, by definition, can stop you from consuming documentation using machine translation, what you cannot do per these guidelines is contribute translations or documentation using an LLM or pretend you speak a language to contribute, and that is eminently reasonable.

You will continue to be able to translate the English documentation into Spanish but they will understandably not publish machine translation as authoritative technical documentation.

It doesn't elminate the problems of AI translation, it just shifts it into users in global south countries and makes fixing them harder because there is no transparency in private by default AI chats to know which parts of the translation are wrong

This is a somewhat common talking point for supporting LLMs. What did non-English speakers do before LLMs?

They learned English or gave up.

Or got help from someone else who was better at English.

What about translation software that existed before LLMs?

I don't believe Proposal A forbids this usage.

I would say it leaves communication between individuals in a gray area. And discourages translation work because it has to be done manually. I would say, LLM-translated text on documentation is better than having an LLM translate it again and again on the fly every time someone asks how to do something, because the LLM-translated text can be corrected for everyone to see, whereas conversations with LLMs stay private by default.

For now, I find the quality of LLM translation highly inadequate, I can do much better, and LLMs agree my translation is much better. So I think "no LLM for official documentation" could be a right call, for now. It should be re-evaluated as LLM translation advances.

I believe the bigger risk is not low translation quality but choosing instead to use an LLM in a private by default conversation because the LLM rule discourages translation which causes the no information in native language problem which forces the use of LLMs, and thus the LLM output can contain wrong commands which have bricked some computers on reddit

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