this post was submitted on 12 Oct 2023
355 points (97.8% liked)
Linux
47361 readers
1088 users here now
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).
Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.
Rules
- Posts must be relevant to operating systems running the Linux kernel. GNU/Linux or otherwise.
- No misinformation
- No NSFW content
- No hate speech, bigotry, etc
Related Communities
Community icon by Alpár-Etele Méder, licensed under CC BY 3.0
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Minecraft got in trouble when the Afrikaans translation had the n-word (in English) due to a malicious translator. CDPR had an issue with the Ukrainian translation making references to the ongoing war.
This sort of thing happens somewhat frequently. It's the same reason how fake sign language interpreters can hold positions. It's hard to verify the accuracy of a translation in a language you don't speak. They have to trust that the translator did their job right.
Translations are usually just text strings. No reasonable project would allow translators to write code.
I mean honestly though, if there are code reviews, how hard would it be to just make a quick "translation review", putting the stuff through a translator program, and verifying it's not obvious bullshit? Especially for new/unknown contributors. Of course it's additional work, again, but a sanity check should easily be possible.
Quite hard. We had Open Source'ish LLMs for only around six months, if they are even up to the task of verifying a translation is another issue and if they are up to Debian's Open Source guidelines yet another. This is obviously going to be the long term solution, but the tech for that has simply not been around for very long.
And of course once you have translation tools good enough for the task, you might just skip the human translator altogether and just use machine translations.
I more meant that if something contains "fucking kill all ukrainians and trans people", which it sounds like this was something like that, that should be possible to see even with bad translation tools.