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Translation
There is much debate about machine translation due to its imperfect nature, and lack of localization relative to culture, nuance, etc. It is often obvious to fluent speakers when a machine translated content. Many non-profit and government resources do rely on translation tools to translate web content however. This is due to lack of resources (and I would argue lack of investment in infrastructure to support localization). Contrast with Wikipedia, which offers language-based portals maintained by human editors. A trade-off in human translation is that the English version of Wikipedia has more articles, by millions. It may also be unclear to visitors that content is localized and therefore likely different between the language versions. I have sometimes found better information about Polish cities and towns, for instance, by visiting the Polish version of Wikipedia and allowing my browser to attempt an English translation. Even as a frequent web user, I did not originally realize the difference could be that significant.
When an institution relies on machine translation, a disclaimer may be necessary citing the original language as the "source of truth." See State of California's disclaimer.
For years this feature was a go-to low-cost solution offered by Google. Around ~2019 the documentation was pulled offline to discourage new use of the plug-in. It partially re-opened to qualifying non-profit and government institutions in May 2020. Given that documentation can't be accessed, it is likely the service will eventually be discontinued.
With time browsers have started building translation into the browser itself. However not all browsers have invested (or have the resources) to achieve this.
| Browser | Description |
|---|---|
| Chrome | ✔️ Built-in feature (Google) |
| Edge | ✔️ Built-in feature (Microsoft) |
| Firefox | Advocates for unofficial Google Translate extension, but plug-in uses Google Translate web service and creates partial (often partially broken) mirror of site |
| Safari | Supposedly partially built in but I could not invoke it? |
Not having a strategy here can make for a very confusing experience for users. I'm unsure what research says about users experiencing mixed language feeds. The topic is similar to mixed language print instructions (with languages side-by-side or repeated in language sections).
A popular strategy for dubbed or localized content is to create official language channels corresponding to the main brand. YouTube has recently rolled out a feature that allows brands and organizations to roll this content in the primary channel videos instead. The dub tracks can be uploaded with a single video. This does not address cases where a video was localized however, and is not dubbed. It seems necessary to support not just a dub track, but also an entirely alternate version of the video, in a target language. Does this exist on other video services?
Testing what this does?