Translate for Zotero worked great yesterday but now doesn't

MMFishes
Hello,

I was so excited to learn about this plugin. I installed it yesterday and it worked so well! Sadly, since yesterday it thinks everything is German, and even if I change the language it does not translate. I've reinstalled it, tried other services, and restarted my computer. Is this a just one use sort of plugin? Is it not working because of a paywall/subscription need?
Sadly, there is very little support about the plugin, and there's also no clarity on the name - is it Translate for Zotero? Or Zotero PDF translate?
Any help will be very much appreciated.

https://s3.amazonaws.com/zotero.org/images/forums/u9216764/aobk4jfikmqo4dotbm1s.png

https://s3.amazonaws.com/zotero.org/images/forums/u9216764/hbs73pqj75oy81lsc5zd.png

https://s3.amazonaws.com/zotero.org/images/forums/u9216764/72szzrytf67i45nbbohb.png

https://s3.amazonaws.com/zotero.org/images/forums/u9216764/twe1202ymu255tc6m87y.png

Thanks,
Miguel M
  • MMFishes
    I found the solution!

    It seems that having the "Auto Detect Item Language" box selected in Zotero settings >> Translate was messing up big time. I checked it off and now when I select the language from the dropdown on the context menu it works perfectly. Maybe through the inaccuracies of OCR it was having trouble automatically detecting a correct language.

    https://s3.amazonaws.com/zotero.org/images/forums/u9216764/8v0j75d2l4ohdn65qbzh.png

    Other interesting symptoms that I got from when it was not working correctly was that I would highlight a line and it would translate it perfectly, and then I would highlight the next one and it would fail. It was probably detecting two different languages for the two lines.

    Another thing to also note is that it seems that the auto detected language would override the dropdown selected one. So, no matter which one I selected it would fail for some lines and succeed for others still.

    I am so glad that it works now! Having this feature makes my work of perusing through hundreds of old fish fossil manuscripts so much streamlined.
  • Nolord
    I just realized that this was the cause for my issue as well. I had a bunch of entries in my bibliography with the "language" field filled with "de" (german) for absolutely no reason. These entries came from arXiv, published papers with and without a doi, so it was not a matter of wrong metadata. I fixed one entry from "de" to "lat" (latin) and when I opened the file, it overwrote the language to "de", even though the paper is in latin and has no OCR, nor metadata suggesting it is in german.
    I think your issue was related to the fact that the plugin translates the selected text according to what's in the language field, and if it were "de" for a french paper, it wouldn't have worked. And the plugin can manage without anything in the field, so that's why it solved your problem.
  • hsiangyu_wong Zotero Team
    Yes.

    This plugin uses the title + abstract to infer the language if the item was not provided with the language field, and in case that detection was wrong, some services (mostly non-LLM services) will fail to provide a valid result. If you have issues with that, disabling the auto-detect is the right move.
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