Microsoft can’t get their automatic translations up to quality, who own OpenAI, how’s MDN going to get this right? You’ll be constantly fighting with the model.

Piece if Evidence A:„DLL Surrogate“ is not „DLL-Ersatzzeichen“.

Thank you for trying out theexperimental German translation, and for taking the time to provide this feedback. 🙌

Love howthis page in German encourages people to "make use of diarrhea" ("Ausnutzen des Durchfalls").

First of all, great catch! 🙂

Looking into thetranslation history of this page, 3 out of 4 translations used the English term "fall-through", while only the most recent one replaced it with the German words "Durchfall" and "Durchfallen".

While this translation is not necessarily incorrect, it highlights a trade-off: leaving a term untranslated (e.g., "fall-through") vs. using a German equivalent that, while technically accurate, might feel unconventional or humorous to some readers. I have re-translated the page with our latest prompt, which now uses "fall-through" again:mdn/translated-content-de@b58ce94

@yatil Could you confirm whether "fall-through" should remain untranslated? If a German translation is preferred, do you have a suggestion for an alternative that might work better? Based on your input, we can update our translation glossary to ensure consistent handling of this term moving forward.

how’s MDN going to get this right? You’ll be constantly fighting with the model.

@AliveDevil MDN is committed to transparency in its approach to machine translation, and we encourage the Community to participate in refining the German translation. We believe that collaboration and feedback from both beginners and experienced developers will significantly improve translation quality over time. To support this, we’re actively seeking input through multiple channels, such as the "MDN-Feedback-Box" at the bottom of every translated page, discussions like this one, and the#german channel on Discord.

Please continue to share any terminology issues you spot, along with your suggestions for improvements. 🙏 Your feedback is invaluable to us.

PS: We kindly ask everyone to follow theMozilla Community Participation Guidelines to ensure a constructive and respectful collaboration. Let’s stay direct, but also positive and solution-oriented. 😊

I will not help support machine-translated resources, so I cannot reply to your question, even if I knew the answer.

While this translation is not necessarily incorrect

It is. "Ausnutzen des Durchfalls" is not the correct translation. "Taking advantage of fall-through" is translated with "Taking advantage of diarrhea" in this post.

"Ausnutzen des Durchfallens" would be technically correct. Even if it's a completely weird way to write.

You want to know what shouldn't be translated automatically from your AI? Everything. Hire translators or keep it in English. Please this does more harm for everyone involved that it helps anyone.

The re-translation of the switch page is now live, see:Ausnutzen des Fall-through-Verhaltens.

Thank you. I double-checked, and this is the only page that uses this term, and the current translation now consistently uses the term "Fall-through".

@philo1989 Thank you for your feedback.

I invite you to try out the experimentalRemember language feature that allows you to set your preferred language, and ensures that you will always be redirected there if the current page exists in that language.

Why not adhere to the standardAccept-Language instead? Being german my mother language, I also have english in that list, as I understand both languages fine. So my browser tells you literally "the client prefers german and if that is not available, english".

The automatic translations pratically always contain nonsense and are counterproductive, especially on tech topics. It's annoying to turn off this stuff on increasingly many sites (Microsoft, Google, ...).

If I would need a translation I would ask the browser to translate the page with the inbuilt translator.

I second what@jampy posted: I configured the user settings of my browser to use 1. German 2. English and this is not meant as a request to feed me machine translations. Yes, I see that you provide an opt-out, but you got it wrong, it shouldn't be opt-out, it should be opt-in if anything.
Even your own survey results show that the overwhelming majority of users would still prefer the english version even if a german version was available:

We asked what language they would use if MDN was available in German:

• 62% participants indicated a preference for English (54% would use mostly English, 8% more English),

To activate it for all users by default is not only annoying, it is patronizing.

@philo1989 Thank you for your feedback.

I invite you to try out the experimentalRemember language feature that allows you to set your preferred language, and ensures that you will always be redirected there if the current page exists in that language.

Why is an experimental feature forced onto users instead of opt-in?
Even if this experimental feature is opt-out, why is there no direct way of switching back to English inside the banner?
Why is there no possibility to complain about the translation as the default inside the feedback section?

And even your survey doesn't seem really conclusive. I really don't get on what basis this feature is considered useful.

I hate these localization, as they make my life harder to simply read some documentation, just because I'm a non-native English speaker.
And I know from quite a few peers I'm not the only one.

English is a mandatory subject in German school system, everyone needs to acquire English skills. So if your target audience for MDN is German children under 14 than this feature may be useful, but elsewise it is not.

It makes life harder as these translations are always not quite right. There may be figures that not fit the text, even variables that may be cross referenced inside the documentation text. And sometimes translated terminology is simply harder to understand. If you want to find more information it's alot harder as these translations are never consistent and even if they would be consistent there would be alot more English content out there.

In the "best case" it would lead to more content tailored to a specific language, but this would result in less helpful results on Google or any other search engine, as every language would use their own terminology or phrasing.
The result is splitting the programming community by language instead of being inclusive.

Cross referencing English and translated documentation is really hard even if you are quite familiar with English and German terminology. Cross referencing is alot harder than consistently using English for docs.
Even the Google result suggest that the result is English to then find these awful translation when you click on it. If I would want a German version I would search for a German version.

Instead of this translation effort you could consider finding passages that are hard to understand for non-native speakers and improve these sections or try to use some language processing to find words or phrases that are uncommon and as such less known by non-native speakers. You may even try LLMs to find sections that might be hard to understand or even establish a workflow that require easy readability before something is added to the docs.

But this AI-translation are not a good solution and even docs on Google or Microsoft that had these kind of translation for quite some time still fail to deliver quality results.
If you still want to pursue these translations than at least make them opt-in or find a better solution that fixes these concerns in a systemic way. Wikipedia for example made the language selection more prominent, which is quite nice. You could make the translated version a separate site like Wikipedia, that can be indexed by Google, so if someone searches for German information that is on MDN they could find it.
But forcing (hidden opt-out) German people into a solution that they don't want is not nice.

@jampy You can switch to the original version by selecting "English (US)" in the language switcher on the top right:

You can enable "Remember language" to always be redirected to that language, even if clicking on a/de/ link (e.g. when using a search engine).

@caugner thanks, but it's not really easy to find in the mobile version (it's hidden in one of three menus). Since there is already a banner for the translation experiment visible, a direct command would be useful.

I had also a hard time finding the language option on mobile. Please don't do this by default.

At least put an "Switch to original" prominently in the info box.

Please don't make assumptions on what would be good for other people if you are not part of that group.

I am part of the german speaking group, and i can say i find it incredibly annoying. I have been hit with autotranslated content also on the microsoft c# docs page for instance, and on reddit, and it is incredibly frustrating. basically before i can interact with the content i have to turn it off, because i absolutelywant reliable information. Information that has a traceable source. Translations are never as accurate as the original, and this really matters in many cases of programming (think about security, reliability, data integrity, etc. - this is stuff i really do not want to jeopardise).

I have seen that there appears to be a way of having the site remember my choice, though i really think this translation feature does not bring any real benefit whatsoever.
Like, English is my second language, and German is my primary one, yet i still have to switch it to English so that the information has a clear source. So I would argue that it does in fact not helpanyone that wants to be certain - and if you start reading documentation you usually do want to be certain, otherwise you could also just give it a shot and see what happens.

Please donot participate in this trend, MDN.

@wparad I too am a native German speaker and English is only my second language - and I too prefer text in its original version and switch all documentation I read to English. But surely, for people who are not yet well-versed in the English language, 95% accurate translations should be helpful and lower the barrier of entry for them - even if the translations feel a little awkward and stiff at times. The German option is also completely additional to the rest of MDN and there is no obligation to use it.

What I do understand can be annoying, and I would be annoyed by this myself, is if websites would constantly autoswitch to German based on my location or something and ignore my preference. I have all my locales set to English, so this doesn't really happen for me anymore, but I can't speak on how MDN behaves regarding this matter.

@Vanilagy but these are developer docs not user facing help sites, and most German speaking developers I know prefer the original English version. That's why I think here it should be the other way round: displaying a banner that say's that the docs are also available in (auto translated) German.

@kleinph Yeah of course, I think that makes sense. This feature shouldn't be an annoyance to the German devs who always go for the English docs.

I just found that there's this toggle here:

It seems like this was explicitly added to address the issue that people want a fixed language, but their search engine might return localized results first.

Thanks for the report, this is now fixed viamdn/translated-content-de@815643e.

PS: I checked, and this was the only occurrence of this issue. If this happens again, we will consider refining the translation automation.

This! So much This! Thank you for articulating what I strongly feel myself but lack the patience and emotional self-command to type up; coherently, eloquent, clear, while staying polite.
The way this ill feature was pushed upon us is patronizing and insulting. It deigns to do something on my behalf I never asked for, nor need, nor want, and is even getting in my way to boot. And I reckon that this is the case for the majority of users.

Thank you for taking the time to provide your feedback. 🙌

Most of the translated content isn'ttechnically incorrect (save for "Durchfall" which was absolutely incorrect, there's no denying it).

If you come across technically inaccurate content, please alwaysreport issues with the German content here. 🙏

For the record, as of May 2025, no systematic errors with the German locale have been reported, and the feedback received so far via the article footer is mostly positive.

The current implementation feels like a solution looking for a problem. This is especially true for users who havebothde anden in theirAccept-Language header. This clearly states:I am proficient in both languages. Given the choice, show me the original language. DO NOT auto-translate, unless the content is neither inde nor inen!

To clarify: MDN uses theAccept-Language header to redirect youonly if the URL you're requesting does not include any locale.
Otherwise, MDN doesnot redirect you, even if the locale of the requested URL is not in yourAccept-Language header.

Please note that this behavior has not changed. If you think this is wrong, I encourage you toopen a new frontend issue here.

I commend your effort to improve accessibility for one group, but only as long as it doesn't negatively impact the other in a big way.

I get your strong opinion, and frustration, but I still believe that it's fair for users to activate the "Remember language" function once if they prefer the English version. If you have suggestions to make this feature easier to enable or discover, pleaseopen a new frontend issue here.

PS: We're aware of limited discoverability of the feature on mobile (seethis thread below).

Thanks for flagging! We're aware of this issue, and it will be fixed in our new front-end that we're currently working on.

Who could've known that German translations could evoke such rage in people 😅

I think "Remember language" is literally the "Never again pester me by forcing translations over the original, just show the unadulterated document" button you're looking for, by the way. I also generally recommend changing your browser's locale to English if you mostly browse English content, that way you can avoid this stuff entirely. It's what I did despite being German.

@Vanilagy good idea, until you find German websites that enforce English machine translation on you. Sadly those pages are most of the time not run by experienced web-loving people, in hard contrast to the situation we see with mdn.

Edit 3: With a HTTP_ACCEPT_LANGUAGE = 'en-US,en;q=0.5' this forced translation into German can only be caused by IP geolocation.

@kernschmelze Could you provide exact steps to reproduce? With thatAccept-Language header, accessing MDN without a locale specified correctly redirects toen-US. And when requesting a specific locale (de,en-US,fr), the server responds with the requested page as expected:

$ curl -IH "Accept-Language: en-US,en;q=0.5" https://developer.mozilla.org/      HTTP/2 302 cache-control: no-storelocation: /en-US/...$ curl -IH "Accept-Language: en-US,en;q=0.5" https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/HTTP/2 200 ...$ curl -IH "Accept-Language: en-US,en;q=0.5" https://developer.mozilla.org/de/   HTTP/2 200...$ curl -IH "Accept-Language: en-US,en;q=0.5" https://developer.mozilla.org/fr/   HTTP/2 200...

If you want to be redirected to another locale regardless of what locale you specify, then you should consider using theRemember language feature (seethis announcement for details).

Hi@salzig,

I'm the Community Manager at MDN, and I need to step in here to remind you of ourCommunity Participation Guidelines. Using hostile or offensive language is not acceptable in our spaces. If this continues, we may need to take further action.

We absolutely value your feedback on the German translation experiment. We appreciate the actual feedback here, and please keep sharing these kinds of insights to help us improve the experience for everyone.

Let’s keep the discussion respectful.

To answer your question, you can find a dialog box on top right of any reference page where you can also store your preference to use English by default.

Hope this helps.

Nicely handled,@pransh15. I think it's time for me to unsubscribe from this thread. 80% of the comments are "Omg these translations suck, why can't I disable them permanently"... when you clearly can disable them permanently. Don't see why people need to rant when the switch to use English for the rest of their lives is 5 seconds away.