Write your profile in your own language. It publishes in English.
Orthodoxy is not an English-speaking church, and a lot of our members would write a far better profile in Russian, Greek, Romanian, Serbian or German than they can in English. So they can. Write your bio in whatever language you actually think in, and it publishes in English with a small note underneath saying which language it came from. Your original is kept, and your name is never touched.
What changed
Six fields, translated on save
Your bio, what you are looking for, desired qualities, profession, school and home parish. Your name is never translated.
A visible note, not a silent rewrite
Translated fields carry a “Translated from Russian” label so nobody is reading your words thinking you wrote them that way.
Locations are English too
City and country names now save in English regardless of your phone’s language, which fixed a real mess in the profile data.
Why bother
Because the alternative was worse in both directions. Members were either writing stilted English that made them sound less interesting than they are, or writing in their own language and being skipped by everybody who could not read it. Neither is a good outcome on an app whose whole job is helping people find each other.
A profile is also the one piece of writing where sounding like yourself matters most. Three sentences in your own language will usually say more than a paragraph assembled out of a dictionary.
The three guards, and why they exist
Automatic translation is dangerous in a very specific way: it is extremely confident about short text and extremely bad at it. Before this shipped we ran the whole corpus through a dry run and watched it propose rewriting ninety-odd fields of perfectly good English.
“No” was read as Latvian and became “From”. “Programmer” was read as Slovenian and became “Programs”. “Addis Ababa” became “New flower”. Somebody’s baptismal name “Paulus” was detected as Acehnese and turned into “Paul”. None of that ever reached a profile, but it is exactly what a naive version of this feature would have done on day one.
So there are three rules and we are not loosening them. Baptismal names are never translated, because names are people. An answer that exactly matches one of the options we offered was picked from a list rather than written, so it is left alone. And short Latin-script text is only translated when it is long enough to be judged and matches the dominant language of the rest of your profile.
- Names are never sent anywhere. Not your display name, not your baptismal name.
- Answers chosen from a list we provided are never rewritten.
- Short Latin-script text must agree with the rest of your profile before it is touched.
- Text in a non-Latin script bypasses those length rules, because it is self-evidently not English.
The location bug this uncovered
While we were in there we found something genuinely embarrassing. The map component had never been told what language to answer in, so it answered in whatever language the member’s browser was set to. Profiles were saving city and country as “Νάουσα, Ελλάδα”, “Sacramento, Соединенные Штаты Америки” and “Deutschland”.
That makes a location unsortable, unfilterable and unsearchable, which quietly breaks distance matching for the people affected. Country names now come from the two-letter country code rather than from any display text, the map is pinned to English, and the database itself rejects a non-English location — including one written by our own tools.
The repair ran over every profile in the same change. Thirty-six distinct spellings of country collapsed to thirty-one real countries, and nothing non-English was left behind.
What you see on a profile
A translated field looks normal and reads normally. Underneath it sits a small label naming the source language. On the editor screen there is a notice telling you this will happen before you write, so nothing is a surprise after you press save.
If you later rewrite a field in English yourself, the label disappears, because the credit belongs to the text and not to you. And if you write the same thing twice, we do not send it again — the English version is kept alongside the original precisely so the note cannot silently vanish on a second save.
Try it