Feedback on automated French translations in Vercel AI SDK documentation

Feedback
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1

Hey folks,

I am observing this tendency to automate translations for developers documentation, which is of course tempting at the era of AI. Sadly, the result is often counter-productive and doesn’t account for cultural shift and actual language use.
Examples in French for Vercel AI SDK documentation:

  • Cookbook become “livre de cuisine” (must admit this one is hilarious)

  • App Router becomes “router d’applications” : totally misleading translation, no French will ever translate that

  • AI SDK Core : Noyau du SDK d’IA : same

  • etc.

At least named entities should be preserved.

French-speaking canadians happens to be stricter on having proper translations but in France most developers I meet are using both English and French as their working language and translating everything or even translating documentations at all tends to be actually worse.

Switching language is not obvious on the AI SDK docs either, a button should be provided to switch back to English. See Datadog takes on this.

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Related posts for Cursor : https://forum.cursor.com/t/strop-the-translation-chainsaw-massacre/144310

To end on a positive note : the doc itself is excellent, thanks a lot for this quality work :folded_hands:

4

Hey Eric,

I don’t think the docs have automatic language translation. At least I’m not aware of it being a feature, and the docs aren’t automatically translated for me when I switch my browser language.

Do you have a browser extension or setting that might be automatically translating things for you?

1 Like
5

Well my bad if it’s not on Vercel side actually! I’ve noticed that automated translation kicks in more and more in various application so the culprit might be Google Chrome actually. I can’t reproduce systematically, so I’ll try to figure what’s going on more precisely.

I wonder if there are ways to prevent these automated localization from the website standpoint though (like forcing to respect the language indicated in the html tags etc. ?), they tend to lead to a terrible user experience in the end. There is this idea that LLMs did solve the problem of automated translation but we are quite far from that.

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