If people find writing in their native language easier, then that is great, and it’s something we want to encourage!
The difficulty is the accessibility of it to the majority of English-speaking website users here.
What I’ve done so far is updated the Review form so you can now choose a language when submitting the review. This will be saved alongside the review, and we can do things with it in future:
We could give people the option to hide reviews not written in their preferred language(s)
Or we could show an automatic translation of reviews into English, for any review that is not in their preferred language(s)
For example, if you speak Spanish and English but not French, we could translate all French reviews to English, but show you Spanish reviews as they were originally written.
What do you think about these options? Would you use them?
And the translations would need to be done using AI, some people have strong feelings about that. Would you want a way to disable this feature?
I think that having a option to select what language you’re writing your review in coupled with an optional “translate” option on submitted/published reviews is the way to go. The hide foreign language reviews might be fine, but if the language is clearly stated then hiding it wouldn’t be necessary. Then if someone wants to read a foreign language review they have the option to translate it if they do choose.
I think it would be nice to have an option to read reviews in other languages. My heart wants to be against AI but I appreciate that it is probably the only option that makes much sense, and honestly how different is that to slapping it in Google Translate. A note to say AI was used is probably for the best too
The only thing I’m concerned about with reviews in other languages is moderation—how do we make sure they are proper reviews that don’t violate the site rules if there aren’t people here who understand the foreign languages properly?
Other than that, I don’t have any problems with this. Hiding foreign language reviews should work as well as translating foreign languages to English.
Well, the translate button will be available to everyone, and so mods can translate it first and then read it.
I’ve already got a working prototype of this now. It’s pretty cool! To save calls to ChatGPT (and make it quicker) I will save the translation in the database so it doesn’t have to be generated every time, but will give mods the ability to regenerate it if it is incorrect.
I will clearly label that it was translated by AI.
I really like it if there are reviews in different languages! I’ve really enjoyed reading some French reviews as I so rarely get the opportunity to use my French skills since leaving school. I think as long as the language is visible, having options to hide it or translate it would both be fine
I love the idea of being able to read reviews in other languages, and have other native language speakers enjoy the English reviews on the site. Great approach.
Glad to see Reviews are allowed to be in other Languages. Others have already made good points about it. I do think what was mentioned in the Original Post, if possible, I do think the Option of disabling this feature, (IF possible) would be a good call honestly.
I will write all my reviews in Rövarspråket from now on!
Rövarspråket explanation from Wikipedia
Rövarspråket (English: The Robber Language) is a Swedishlanguage game. It became popular after the books about Bill Bergson by Astrid Lindgren, where the children use it as a code, both at play and in solving actual crimes.[1]
The formula for encoding is simple. Every consonant (spelling matters, not pronunciation) is doubled, and an o is inserted in-between. Vowels are left intact. It is possible to render the Rövarspråket version of an English word as well as a Swedish, such as the following for the word stubborn:
sos-tot-u-bob-bob-o-ror-non or sostotubobboborornon
The code is not very useful in written form, but it can be difficult to decode when spoken by a trained user speaking quickly. For an untrained speaker, a word or phrase can often be something of a tongue-twister or a shibboleth.
The main thing with AI is that I’d want there to be a toggle button on the reviews themselves so I could clearly see the original. I can read a bit of Portuguese but not necessarily whole reviews in it, so I might want to, for example, read the AI translated version but, if I find a strange or interesting passage, check the original Portuguese to see what it said originally.
Other than that I don’t have a problem with it as long as it’s labeled.
Our Patrons have been testing out this feature and it is now LIVE!
For reviews which have been specifically written in another language (and they selected the language when submitting them), there will be two tabs - an “original” and an “English translation”.
If you’re the first one reading it in English you’ll need to click the “translate” button and wait a few seconds, then it will be translated and stored!
Let me know if there are any issues, or if you find any users who have reviews which aren’t marked yet, I can change those my end
Hi!
Have a little problem with this feature…
Information about reviews does not take into account words written in Cyrillic. For example screenshot with word count from TARDIS Guide and screenshot with word count from Google Documents.
