I don't think local boards should be underestimated, even the least active ones can hold useful information for those who arrive there via a search made in their mother tongue, even without being active on the forum itself.
The point is not in local sections, but in the translators themselves, who very often do not understand what they are writing about. Usually it goes like this:
Someone comes to the forum and is interested in the service, OP does not respond at all to questions in his thread, after which the user goes to the main thread in English and receives answers to all questions. The forum is not only an information platform, but also a place for discussions. If someone writes a translation about a service, but he does not understand the basic mechanisms of the service and has no experience in using the service, then this translation is not information, but simply a mountain of garbage.
Dear Ratimov, I would like to know what translators you are talking about specifically, because as far as I know many of us are not only translating these topics (100% by hand, at least in my case, and I'd swear that I'm not the only one), but answering the questions the members of our local boards have about them too, and also keeping them alive while the interest on the topic lasts.
Instead of criticize us all in a generic way, I genuinely think that it would be much more helpful to give a wake-up call to these translators you found to be making things wrong.