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.