> who knows if the automated translations do not help more people than it hurts the translators
Everyone speaking more than one language knows. Human translations for things like software are bad enough as-is, but automated translations are universally horrible.
I set all of my software to English despite it not being my native language, simply because a lot of concepts don't translate cleanly and end up with forced and cringeworthy phrasing. Combine that with the un-Google-ability of translated errors and issues, and going for an interface in the native English verson is a no-brainer.
And that's with translations done by actual humans! Sites like Youtube have tried "helpfully" pushing machine translations on me for a looong time, and it is painfully clear to anyone speaking both the source language and the target language that the translation is absolute garbage and essentially unusable.
In fact, I barely speak any German (got a year or two of it in high school, but my grades were fairly embarrassing), but I prefer struggling with the native version over a machine translation. Given my knowledge of German-adjacent languages I can mostly make out the meaning of the original, and there's always the dictionary for the handful of words I'm not familiar with.
Everyone speaking more than one language knows. Human translations for things like software are bad enough as-is, but automated translations are universally horrible.
I set all of my software to English despite it not being my native language, simply because a lot of concepts don't translate cleanly and end up with forced and cringeworthy phrasing. Combine that with the un-Google-ability of translated errors and issues, and going for an interface in the native English verson is a no-brainer.
And that's with translations done by actual humans! Sites like Youtube have tried "helpfully" pushing machine translations on me for a looong time, and it is painfully clear to anyone speaking both the source language and the target language that the translation is absolute garbage and essentially unusable.
In fact, I barely speak any German (got a year or two of it in high school, but my grades were fairly embarrassing), but I prefer struggling with the native version over a machine translation. Given my knowledge of German-adjacent languages I can mostly make out the meaning of the original, and there's always the dictionary for the handful of words I'm not familiar with.