MetaCity's Real-Time Chat Translator Has Been Translating Everything Into the Wrong Language for 7 Hours — Users Set to English Are Receiving Kelvari, Users Set to Kelvari Are Receiving Unstructured Symbol Strings

MetaCity's Universal Chat Translator — a platform-native tool that processes all in-app messages in real time and renders them in each user's set language preference — has been producing incorrect outputs for every user on the platform for the past seven hours. Users whose language preference is set to Standard English are receiving messages rendered in Kelvari, one of MetaCity's constructed platform languages. Users whose language preference is set to Kelvari are receiving messages rendered in unstructured strings of punctuation and symbol characters that do not correspond to any registered MetaCity language. MetaCity's communications infrastructure team confirmed the issue two hours ago. A fix has not deployed.

MetaCity's Universal Chat Translator processes roughly 4 billion messages per day across direct messages, group chats, district channels, and marketplace listings. It is not a feature that most users think about explicitly — it runs invisibly in the background, rendering every incoming message in whatever language the recipient has set as their preference, so that the platform's genuinely multilingual user base can communicate without friction. For most users, the translator has been invisible for so long that they have forgotten it exists. This morning reminded them. The Kelvari language that English-preference users have been receiving for seven hours is fully legible to the approximately 3.1 million MetaCity users who speak it — but for the platform's 200 million English-preference users, it is a constructed language they have not studied, displayed in place of every message they receive from every source on the platform.

The second-order consequences have accumulated quickly. Marketplace listings are descriptions of goods and prices — when those descriptions arrive in the wrong language, buyers cannot evaluate what they are purchasing. Rental agreements contain terms and conditions — when those terms arrive as symbol strings, neither party can confirm what they agreed to. District event announcements carry times, locations, and participation instructions — when those announcements are unreadable, events fail to attract attendance or attract attendees who show up without knowing what they signed up for. The District 3 commercial market suspended operations at noon specifically because its transaction infrastructure depends on clear written communication between buyers and sellers, and that communication is currently broken at the platform layer. MetaCity's suggestion that users can disable the translator to receive raw untranslated text is, for users who don't share a language with the people they're communicating with, not a solution.

Every Message on the Platform Is in the Wrong Language. The Support Queue Has the Same Problem.

The support queue situation is a particular species of institutional comedy. MetaCity's in-app support communication runs through the same translation layer as every other chat on the platform. Users submitting support tickets about the translation error are having those tickets rendered in the wrong language for the support agents receiving them. Support agents responding to tickets are having their responses rendered in the wrong language for the users receiving them. Several users have published screenshots of support conversations in which neither party's messages are interpretable by the other — exchanges that are, in their content, presumably about the translation problem, and that are, in their form, a perfect demonstration of it. MetaCity has not announced a fix timeline. The suggestion to disable the translator remains the platform's only official guidance.