Okay, I understand English is the universal language and when posting a comment regarding a show or movie people should write it in English so that others can understand better. But if the original language of the show isn’t in English, then why restricting people to comment on English only? I was watching a show which originally released in Hindi and when I tried to post a comment on the app which I wrote in Hindi, it refused to post, got the error messages, “Something went wrong submitting your comment…” No clear mention what the error was. So I tried the website and there I got the actual reason that the comment should be in English only.
So, fix these things.
Comments can be posted in different language if that show is in different language.
In answer to your first question, I would imagine having to comment in English on Non English content, might be because, there are a huge amount of people who watch Non English shows/movies with subtitles (myself included) as I only read and speak English, and if I wanted to see comments on a Hindi show or movie, having comments written in Hindi wouldn’t help me very much, as you say English is a universal language, therefore caters to most of the world.
The main reason is we’re not able to moderate non English comments effectively. The app should have the correct error message reflected though, that is a bug.
Well, there are even larger numbers of people who watch non-English shows without subtitles because it is their own native language.
And they would like to comment in their language, but they don’t care whether American users can read it or not. They write these comments for people from their own nation.
Yeah, that’s what I’m talking about. Most regional contents are watched by that particular region’s people, and if a show becomes popular, they dub it into other languages too. Take ‘Dark,’ for example, which was a German show and was dubbed into many other languages. Same thing with Squid Game.
I totally get wanting to comment on your own native language shows using your language… but I also see the point of the devs and mods here.
I work with many projects/teams around the world and a few of them are created by devs in their language and translated to English after, so you can post in either language, however, most (even if the devs aren’t native English) are created/staffed by English users. The point I’m making here, one such site I work with was created and maintained by English users but they originally allowed people to comment in their native language and we have a large Dutch based group of users so Dutch is pretty common but none of ‘us’ (the staff) speak or read that language. After about a year of allowing this, we had a user decide that they would make a bunch of political statements (in Dutch) about how a certain Austrian person from the past was ‘right’ and that the world needs to accept his beliefs. (I don’t want to say specifics and get in trouble here, but hopefully you know who I’m talking about. Hint: WW2).
These messages called for violence against specific people based on race/religion and those comments remained on the site for almost 2 days before one of us realized what they were talking about. (Thankfully a Dutch user that is a friend of mine brought this to our attention and we quickly removed it and banned the user.) After that incident, we started allowing enforncing a rule that Dutch users can only post “Thank you” in their language and all other messages/comments must be in English because it’s harder to moderate the world’s 100+ different languages when at best your staff/team may know 3 or 4… maybe a few more, but you get the idea.
This sums up exactly why most forums and discords use English, companies cannot have moderators knowing every language there is, that’s the bottom line, English is " basically" universal and can be observed and moderated the most efficiently.
Adding my story because it exposes a twist I haven’t seen raised here.
I tried to post a Japanese comment on an anime and got “comments must be at least 5 words.” My comment was a full sentence, but Japanese has no spaces, so the validator counts the whole thing as one word. No Japanese comment can ever pass this rule. Then I learned that wasn’t even the real reason: it’s the English-only policy, with the misleading error @justin already flagged as a bug in 2024, still unfixed two years later.
What I can’t reconcile: Trakt Lite greets me in Japanese (ホーム), the catalog indexes anime and J-dramas with native metadata, but when I try to say anything about those works in my own language I’m told to use English. That reads as “we’ll take the content from non-English cultures, but not the voices.” It feels extractive.
And honestly, most of the time I write comments for myself. A personal note of what I thought, while it’s fresh. Forcing me to translate my private reaction into a second language, just so a moderator I’ll never meet can skim it, turns a personal act into homework.
One lightweight direction: filter or rank comments by the viewer’s locale, so English speakers still see English comments first (addressing @Revenir’s concern earlier in the thread) and Japanese speakers see Japanese first. Nobody’s default experience gets worse.
If UI and metadata can be localized, comments should be too.
Hi,
On Trakt V3, you can actually comment on other languages. I’ll bring up the issue with the word limit to the team. From what I tested, the system will only count them as words if spaces or line breaks are added.
Thanks for the quick response and for bringing this to the team. Filing this as a bug report so the team has a concrete repro:
Bug: The 5-word minimum comment validator uses whitespace-separated tokenization, which structurally cannot accept text in languages that don’t use spaces between words (Japanese, Chinese, Korean, Thai, etc.).
Steps to reproduce:
Open the comment form on any show/movie
Type a natural Japanese sentence, e.g. このアニメは本当に素晴らしかった
Attempt to submit
Expected: Comment is accepted.
Actual: Rejected with “comments must be at least 5 words.” The entire sentence is counted as 1 word because it contains no whitespace.
Workaround (confirming this is a validator bug, not a policy restriction): Sprinkling meaningless spaces into the same text passes the check. For example, 日本 語の感 想テスト これ is linguistically nonsense, but it clears the 5-word count and the comment posts successfully.
Proposed fix: Fall back to character-count validation when the input contains CJK characters, or remove the 5-word minimum for CJK locales.
Confirmed! Japanese comments go through fine now. Thanks so much for the incredibly quick turnaround, I genuinely didn’t expect a fix to ship this fast. Really appreciate you and the team.
Honestly you’d think that in this day and age it would be so simple to have a plugin for Discourse similar to one that existed decades ago for VBulletin that allowed people to post in their own language and it would add the translated text in your forum chosen language underneath it.
