Hello,
It's been a few months since the redesigned Lenovo community websites have launched and there is one thing that has been bugging me ever since. For me, as a user from Germany, the website always opens in its auto-translated form, requiring me to manually change it to English with the dropdown menu in the bottom right. Even if I manually set it to English, opening a discussion in a new tab will have the auto-translated version again initially.
What's the issue with this?
Not only is this really annoying from a UX perspective, the translations themselves, especially those of the sites UI elements, are often at the very least quite awkward, or worse: just plain wrong, because whatever translation service you are using translates without any regards to context. This works better in discussions where people are writing actual sentences, but the UI elements often only comprised of a single word suffer greatly from this.
Here is an example I could find right now: Translating "Home" into "Heim" is sort of awkward and unusual in the context of a website, but still perfectly understandable. But what's simply 100% wrong is this: The "About" section is titled "Um" in Germany, which technically is one possible translation of about in some contexts, but makes absolutely zero sense here, it should be titled "Über" instead. In fact, "Um" should NEVER be the first translation choice unless used in very specific sentence structures.
There have been other instances of this in the past, though right now I failed to find any - it seems the translation is not consistent and changes every now and then. Also note how even on the left side of the image, where I manually set it to English, it still shows the German "Aus Legion" (which btw is also awkward, it should say "Von Legion" in German) instead of the English "From Legion").
What should be done about this?
There are two things that should be done to address this issue:
There absolutely needs to be a persistent setting for language preference of users. It could be integrated into the account settings for example. This way, the annoying manual language change could be eliminated. I would be happy with forcing English for everything, but what would be even better what be an additional "always show original" setting for discussion posts - that way I could have the main website in English, most of the posts in English (as that's the language most commonly used here) and the few posts that are written in other languages I could hit the translate button if it's one I don't speak/understand.
Website UI Elements in languages other than English should have fixed/permanent translations that are manually done by a native speaker and should never be done through the auto translation tool.