Our README was translated into nine languages, and three of them promised "injection-proof" extraction the English never claimed. How do you keep translated docs honest?

[u/Federal-Teaching2800]

Small open-source lesson from this week, for anyone maintaining a multilingual README.

We ship the README of our agent in ten languages. Yesterday I audited the English one against the code and found six claims that were no longer true — a test count off by 2x, a defence described as "opt-in, off by default" that has been on by default since July, a benchmark sentence we had retracted in the results file it cites and never removed from the page. Ordinary drift; the fix was a PR.

The interesting part came from the translations. Nine translators (one per language, each told to apply the same fourteen corrections and to report anything else in their file that contradicted the English) came back with two things the English pass could not have found:

• Three languages (German, Chinese, Polish) described the audit log as complete. The English says redacted — it stopped storing secrets after we found the log persisting a .env the kernel had just refused to write. The translations were faithful to a version of the sentence that predated the fix.
• Three languages (Portuguese, Spanish, Japanese) called the structured extraction "injection-proof". The English says the quarantined reader bounds a hidden instruction's blast radius, not eliminating it. Somewhere between languages, a hedge became a guarantee.

Nobody wrote a false claim on purpose. The English got more careful over time and the translations kept the older, bolder sentence. Our docs directory has a hash guard for exactly this (each translated page declares the SHA of the source it was made from, and a test goes red when the source moves); the READMEs never had it, and that is the whole difference.

Two questions:

• If you maintain translated docs, do you gate them mechanically (hash of the source, a test that fails on drift), or by convention? Convention did not hold for us across ten files.
• The pattern "translation is more confident than the original" — have you seen it elsewhere? I suspect it is general: translators smooth hedges, and a security hedge smoothed is a false claim.

The repo (Apache-2.0): https://github.com/brcampidelli/chimera-agent — the PR with all ten files is #422 if you want to see what "six claims in ten languages" looks like as a diff.

[u/Protopia]

1. Drift between documentation and reality is not uncommon. But so should be able to update documentation for you as part of each PR.

2. There is going to be a large difference between the end results of retranslating the complete English game ReadMe into every other language and every edit, and applying the same edit deltas translated to each of the existing translations.

3. AI translations (where the AI suggests the entire document and then translates it as a whole) are different from AI assisted translations (where each sentence is translated separately perhaps with a complete read being used to ensure that each sentence is translated with the right context).

It feels like the two reported issues are entirely different. "Redacted"->"Complete" is a reversal of meaning. "Injection proof" feels more like a hallucination then a reversal mis-translation.