Recently I had reported a bug in a software. The kind person looking at my bug report was not sure what the issue was and I was not sure what they meant when talking about a specific setting.

It then turned out to actually be fine, though the translation described said setting in a completely wrong way, as doing something closer to the opposite.

Having decent translations for your project is important.

Simply having a decent translation not only makes a software much more usable, it will also keep you from having to deal with bug reports for issues you either will not easily understand or will not even find at all.

In this case I was lucky, as I wanted to quote the exact wording of said setting, therefore I switched to English and then noticed that we wording did not match:

English: if old articles reappear after being read
German: wenn ältere Artikel nach dem Lesen erhalten bleiben sollen
Translated back into English: if older articles are to be kept after reading

You probably will share my view that “keeping something from reappearing” and “keeping it” are two different things entirely.

Therefore, please to try to have a decent translation, if and when possible, to avoid running into such confusion.

If you cannot have a decent translation, then consider having none at all. Some projects have translations that are of the quality that makes a software unusable as a user cannot be sure what is going on.

Lastly, if you are working on internationalisation for your favourite free and open source software project, and are not fully quite sure your translation is correct, do not submit that one string. Translate what you are sure about. It should be preferred to have one string in English instead of $language rather than having an incorrect string somewhere in the user interface that misleads users to a false understanding of what a setting does, leading to bug reports as the setting seemingly does not work as intended.