Iâve tried this on several other Discourse instances as well and found the same results, so perhaps this is just a fundamental limitation of Discourse being a client rendered JavaScript application. Does anyone know if there is a way to make this work like it does on most other websites? If not, I saw there was some discussion of adding a machine translation plugin. That would serve the same purpose.
Thanks for the workaround, @jdeeve. Rather annoying that it pops open the browserâs print dialog automatically and removes much of the formatting but itâs better than a blank page. It would be nice if there was a query string parameter that forced the server side rendering Discourse falls back to when JS is disabled and for web index crawlers. Anyway whether itâs due to a google translate limitation or a discourse limitation this is something that works well with the old forum and doesnât with this new one. I think ensuring there is an easy way for people to get a translation should be a priority.
Oof, there are a couple annoying things happening at once:
The version of Firefox (Android) I was using doesnât actually support printing, so it worked fine for me.
The extent to which printing blocks the page is nonstandard. (Chrome begins to print the page when asked but keeps on running scripts.) If you cancel the print preview dialog, the translation will commence.
Google Translate isnât content to read the <noscript> version of a page, it insists on being clever.
Google Translate no longer translates web pages server side, but delivers a page that translates chunks of text as they scroll into view, so you need to scroll to the bottom of the page for the entire text to get translated.
Instead of /print you can use ?_escaped_fragment_, but this does not deliver the whole topic on a single page.
For completeness, omitting the second number in the URL does work in Google translate on Android, although of course the context is completely lost you have to find the bit of the thread you were trying to translate.
Another thing that works is using Google Chrome.
Google Translate is tightly integrated in that browser and it doesnât require the print workaround. Not an ideal solution for those of us who prefer other browsers though.
Thanks for the recommendation. Iâve just tried it out to see if it works better than the addon Iâve been using (To Google Translate). Unfortunately it seems like the full page translation works in the same way, and fails with client side rendering.
Is this working for you in some other way, or do you just select blocks of text to translate? Maybe thatâs what you mean by âworks greatâ. Translating post by post certainly works better than the other addon Iâve been using:
Thanks for creating the thread, I also facing the same issue, as google translate does not work on one site. it shows error. I will try firefox addon if it became available as a Chrome extension.
You canât use Google Translate, because the site doesnât work with that, but do you see the little âglobeâ below each post that you want to translate? Click that, on a post by post basis, and you can see translations.
Itâs obviously not as flexible a solution, and the translations arenât as good, but it does work.
From English to German, I sometimes compare bing, google and deepl. Results vary, no clear all-time winner.
[Above sentences, no one gets both two good. One gets the second clause good and the first one bad, one the other way around. Maybe my English is not up to standard?]
