Issue with Translation Function

Support & Feedback Forum
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I am writing to report an issue with the translation feature. I have manually provided the correct translation in Traditional Chinese. However, recently, there have been frequent instances where my original correct translation is automatically replaced by an AI-generated Simplified Chinese version. Even after I correct it again, the next time I open the lesson, it may be replaced once more by the incorrect AI translation.

For example, the Japanese idiomatic expression 「大目玉を食う」 means “to be severely scolded” or “to receive a harsh reprimand.” When I provide the correct Traditional Chinese translation, it is later automatically overwritten by an incorrect AI-generated Simplified Chinese translation such as “吃掉大眼珠” (literally “eat big eyeballs”), which distorts the intended meaning.

I kindly request that you address this issue by ensuring the system does not overwrite user-provided correct translations without explicit permission.

1 Like
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Thanks for reporting. Our team will look into this.

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That is so, so, true!

I just want to reinforce that this is a real issue that needs to be fixed. It has also happened to my lessons many, many, times. I spend a lot of time correcting translations just to have all that work later disappear when it is all suddenly replaced by an AI translation that has errors. It would probably happen to all of my lessons except that I take several precautions to reduce the frequency of this happening. One thing I never do anymore is audio imports. If I do an audio import (i.e. Whisper AI transcription), it is guaranteed that the translations will be clobbered a few hours later or within a day after I finish editing my lesson. (I have instead started using Subtitle Edit, which has Whisper AI transcription built in, and editing the subtitles is a lot easier now… but there was a lot of configuring of Subtitle Edit, and a learning curve, involved. Definitely not for your typical user.)

Another possible trigger is related to yet another bug. If you do a YouTube import using the LingQ browser extension, you get an automatic translation, but sometimes some of the translation lines (paragraphs) will be empty. The lines are translated in groups of 4, but sometimes the automatic translation puts the translations for the first 2 lines of 4 into 1 line, then the translation for line 2 will actually contain the translation for line 3, the translation for line 3 will actually contain the translation for line 4, and the translation for line 4 will be empty!!! (This happens when the translation is tricky and the AI prefers to move words between lines.) And you could have several of these happening in one imported lesson. The longer the video, the higher the chance of this happening. But the system cheats and sets some sort of flag somewhere saying that all the translations are there and everything is good. So if you go “Show translations”, it won’t complain. BUT: If you edit any lines in the lesson (I don’t remember if you have to add or remove a line, because I always add lines), then that flag gets cleared, and now if you go “Show translations” it will say something like “not all lines have translations, do you want to regenerate them?” Never, ever, do that. If you do, your translations will be clobbered again in the future after you finish editing. Instead hunt down the lines with the missing translations and fix them manually. Remember, it happens in groups of 4 lines, so you will have to fix the neighbouring lines that have the wrong translations too.

But anyways, if you leave a lesson in a state where some translations are missing for too long, for example if you take a break and resume editing later, then your lesson will get queued up in a system to have its translations redone. I’ve had this happen to me. Edit, take a break, edit, share, check, everything looks good, all lines have good translations, come back half a day later, check, and all the translations have been replaced! It’s nerve wracking! And very demotivating.

So, there’s 2 bugs mentioned here that really need to be hunted down and fixed.

And the sad thing is that the one where the translations are automatically replaced is often done on purpose. Very poorly thought out, but done on purpose because a decision is made somewhere that basically decides that the translations are lacking (missing lines or something), so I better queue up the lesson to have its translations redone. (Somehow, I have this feeling that a queue is involved, but maybe not. It just seems like one is. Maybe I feel this because I think that the decision is made while the lesson is being edited and not ready yet, but the action of replacing the translations is not done until much later, after the lesson has been completely edited and is perfect. And then boom, it’s destroyed having its translations replaced.)
At least a few months ago we were getting popups when we logged on telling us that some of our lessons had their translations replaced. And it freaked out a lot of people. It’s still happening, only now the popups have been turned off. So people don’t know.

@mark: Again LingQ guys, these are serious bugs that need fixing!
If you create enough lessons, and check up on them later, you are guaranteed to see these bugs come up time and again.

Zoran, please forward this to whoever works on this and can make a difference.

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@mark:

There is also a similar bug that occurs with Course Descriptions that happens to me regularly. And it just happened to me again. Yesterday I created a new course, carefully crafted its description, only to find today that it was changed. And I’ve lost the description that I carefully crafted yesterday!

But here is a hint of what the system is doing: The undesired replacement description is the same as the description of the only lesson in the course, which also happens to be the full title of the YouTube video for the course. So, one of those 2 things is what your system is replacing people’s carefully crafted course descriptions with. My guess is that it’s the lesson description. And perhaps it only happens to courses that contain only 1 lesson? Or relatively new courses? Why this happens is a mystery to me. Does the system somehow decide it doesn’t like the carefully crafted course description? Did an automated process come along and detect, coincidentally while I was editing the course description that it was empty and decided to queue it up for fixing, and so a few hours later it gets clobbered by copying over the lesson description? (classic race condition situation, but drawn out in a long human-like time scale instead of microseconds.) Did a malicious librarian come along and edit my course description (seems unlikely, especially because it is replaced by the lesson description)? But all these thoughts go through my head… I’m thinking: “Why is this happening? And how can I stop this?”.

Zoran, I know you will ask for an example. This is the course:

(edit: somehow that link doesn’t work. But here is the important part of it: /en/learn/uk/web/library/course/2241295)

As for examples of the other clobbering problem, I have supplied many examples in the past. It never got fixed. I now try my hardest to work around it and not trigger the system into doing it (in part by doing the things I mentioned in my previous post).

Can you guys please investigate this?
And until it is solved, can you just please turn off all automated processes that look for perceived problems and replace people’s hard work with something else (be it sentence translations, or course descriptions, or anything else). Because those decisions to replace people’s work are sloppy and wrong! It’s just really bad practice.

And when doing translations. I know that you translate in groups of 4. When you get those 4 translations, check each one to see if it is empty, and if one of the 4 translations is empty, try again a few times (because sometimes the translations come back a little different and your system can then resolve them into 4 lines instead of 3), or try a different translation method, and, as a last fallback, translate each of those 4 lines individually (I know, not as good without the multi-line context, but it’s better than getting an empty line and all the problems that come with that).

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Oh, and I didn’t notice this when I wrote the above, but not only did the course description get replaced, so did the course image! The course image I had (an image that the artist uses on his channels) was replaced by the image used for the 1 lesson in the course (which is also the thumbnail on YouTube).

And yes, I got the artist’s permission to have his content on LingQ. I first tried to contact him over 2 months ago, but he never got my email. But we have been emailing over the past few days and I now have permission.

Edit: After carefully looking, I just found 2 more courses that had their descriptions and channel images replaced with the description and image from the one lesson (one had a 2nd lesson added recently, but I didn’t notice the course changes until now). I have now once again restored them to what I want. Hopefully they stay put this time.

Another possibility perhaps is that the system is reverting the course description and image to what it originally created when that first lesson was first added. Just a guess. Because I’m pretty sure that the image that the system uses when auto-creating a course when a video from a new YouTube channel is imported is that of the new video’s thumbnail. But that doesn’t explain the course description, I don’t think, as I would think that it originally would have been empty.

Yet another edit: You know, I’m not sure if I’ve ever seen the above mentioned Course-clobbering bug occur on courses that have been manually created. It’s very possible that it may only affect courses that have been automatically created by LingQ when you import a lesson from a new YouTube channel for the first time. So that might be a clue for when you try to track down what is going on. But really, you must know that you have code somewhere that makes a decision to replace course descriptions and images, and lesson translations. You really, really, have to scrutinize that code and fix it. And until it is fixed, disable it!

But I guess for now, I have yet another potential workaround to add to my growing portfolio of LingQ bug workarounds: Don’t ever allow LingQ to auto-create a course. And if it does, then manually create a replacement course, move the lesson into the new course, and then delete the auto-created course.

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@ScottTyler Thanks, I appreciate the additional information.

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It’s a little crazy… I am currently creating a new lesson, and my hand-edited translations just got clobbered with AI translations seconds before I was about to publish the lesson. I had everything carefully edited and perfect, I playback tested my lesson, it and the translations look great, and I am about to switch the lesson to “Shared” when out of the corner of my eye I notice that one of the translations is wrong. And so I look at the others, and they’ve all been replaced! Already! Even before I shared my lesson!
This is the race condition I mentioned earlier, in action. A decision was made to clobber the translations in my lesson even before it was shared. And this has happened to me before. I once thought “Did I just see that translation change right before my eyes? Am I hallucinating? Is that even possible?” I guess it is.
More context: This is probably the shortest lesson I have ever created, so the editing didn’t take that long. It was just a standard Import->Lesson where I provided a .srt subtitle file for a YouTube video. It was not imported via the LingQ browser extension. I never, ever, pressed “Regenerate Lesson” or “Regenerate Full Translation (AI)”. I am terrified of such buttons because I fear that my lesson will get clobbered repeatedly in the future if I do, long after I share my lesson. Yes, I believe that is what happens when you use such buttons: your lesson gets put in a queue for regenerating translations, and the lesson has its translations regenerated, but then the system never removes the lesson from that queue (or perhaps it is added back in again!), and so now it is stuck in a vicious circle where it has it’s translations regenerated over and over again for days on end until something finally happens to clear the queue, like perhaps the server being rebooted. @mark: Please, please, please, investigate and fix this! This is nuts! And yes, I acknowledge that I am a heavy user, maybe even the heaviest that shares lessons on LingQ right now, and so I see things that other people miss. But this problem is real. Many people would have given up and moved on from LingQ when their work gets continually destroyed like that. And maybe that’s what’s happening? You need to fix this for user retention and to motivate people to create lessons without continually being discouraged.

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@ScottTyler We are investigating the issue and we will make sure to have it fixed asap. Thanks for your patience.

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Thanks Zoran! I am so happy that its starting to look promising that a fix is coming for these bugs! I hope you get all 3 of these.

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Hi Scott, Misago -

We are investigating this issue fully and may reach out to you for additional details.

Scott - I’ll send you a message in Slack today.

Misago - If you could send a list of your affected lessons to my email (north @ lingq.com) that would help us.

If any other user has experienced these exact issues, please reach out to us as we will need to ask you some questions about your importing/editing process.