Relevant Mastodon issues:
https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/11013
https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/16692
TBH, I find the comments suggesting that “DeepL [or any other client-side translation service] is enough” to be appalling.
Discussion
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Discussion
Of course those who follow me know that I'm a big fan of #multilingual authoring if not else because of my 2023 article about implementing the #SMIL #switch element in #HTML plus #CSS —which isn't actually possible, requiring a little bit of #JavaScript too:
https://wok.oblomov.eu/tecnologia/switch-element/
(And I'm not saying Mastodon should implement them using the trick above; it definitely needs a better interface.)
Interesting, from the comments I'm seeing, this feature seems more controversial than I expected. There seems to be in particular a crowd that seriously believes client-side translations to be a superior alternative to the author's own words, rather than an “extrema ratio” fallback for untranslated content.
I'm starting to see why Google has been pushing that autotranslated crap on YouTube, the AI brainrot is already dramatically widespread.
I can appreciate the worry about the potential of abuse from people hiding bannable offences in the translations, and how this could make work more difficult for moderators, but I don't share the pessimism: even now, if anything gets into the timeline in a language that isn't understood by the moderators, they're unable to make easily an informed decision. Those tools remain in place, and the report form can include (auto-filled) information about the language for which it is being sent.
@oblomov I don't think that posting messages in multiple languages is the solution
Client side translation is enough, only it should be made easier to have them (less steps, less clicks, maybe a button right there)
There could be cases where it's necessary to have a translation by the author (difficult or ambiguous or not poetic translations by local software)
@filobus hard disagree. Client-side translation should only be considerd a low-quality fallback for the cases where the author did not/could not provide a translation themselves. Allowing users to provide their own translations is an important step to improve the internationalization of the Fediverse.
@oblomov @filobus My guess is that only 0.1% of users would ever use this feature. But the additional UI for it would probably be forced upon everyone.
In many cases I also expect that the manual translation of a non-native speaker is worse than an automatic translation. I see this regularly happen here at work.
@oblomov it is not so clear: the author should provide a translation in... English? Or all the languages of all the readers? Esperanto? The author should be very proficient, and who is not? Software translation could be even better, but the author could not use it because thinks it's better h* own
And one thing doesn't exclude the other, the reader is free to use client's software, the author is free to provide different translations
@filobus authors should be ALLOWED to provide translations in any language they want. It's not an obligation, it's an option.
I for one would like most of my posts to be dual Italian/English. @valhalla often makes the same post twice, once in Italian and once in English (yes, I'm aware that gl-como is on Friendica so an improvement to Mastodon wouldn't benefit it).
@Puxi also does multilingual posts, encountering exactly the issues I mention in the poll (wrong language tagging, and need to fit.)
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