#askFedi Does anybody know if there is an #ActivityPub software that *produces* multilingual objects leveraging the contentMap feature?
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#askFedi Does anybody know if there is an #ActivityPub software that *produces* multilingual objects leveraging the contentMap feature?
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#askFedi would you like to have the possibility to make multilingual (ML) posts, i.e. a *single* post with the text available in multiple languages *at once*? Currently, you have to either do separate posts, or squeeze multiple languages within your server's character limit, and only mark it for one of the languages (see e.g. https://sociale.network/@oblomov/110872023337803783 + https://sociale.network/@oblomov/114983566130691059).
(Select appropriate option based on whether you're a native English speaker.)
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Relevant Mastodon issues:
https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/6920
https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/11013
https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/22766
https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/23698
https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/24011
https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/16692(EDIT: found more, variants of the issue are more popular than I had initially envisioned.)
TBH, I find the comments suggesting that “DeepL [or any other client-side translation service] is enough” to be appalling.
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G gustavinobevilacqua@mastodon.cisti.org shared this topic
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@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.
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@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
Author should have time and put much effortAnd one thing doesn't exclude the other, the reader is free to use client's software, the author is free to provide different translations
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@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.) -
@oblomov Honestly, automatic translation has become so good that I doubt it‘s worth adding this complexity to Mastodon/ActivityPub. The UI for making posts already has too many option and buttons and stuff.
Translation can and should be a concern of the client. It works very well elsewhere.
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@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 @filobus
yes, please, also in #friendica, pliz!Most of the people I interact with speak either English or Italian, so when I write posts I tend to write in English and then translate in Italian in a comment, and being able to mark the two as two versions of the same post would be quite neat!
(also being able to explicitely set the language of the post would be really nice, because as is I don't think that people even on mastodon are able to use translation services at all)
also, maybe we should drop @Puxi @toot.cat from the list of mentions? I don't think that mew_IT is included in any list of languages (and that's discrimination! :D )
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@bitbonk @oblomov @filobus
I'm not against the introduction of such a feature. But I would not use this.
I write in English things that I want for the wider public and which are more general. I write in Italian and Spanish things that I refer towards Italian and Spanish circles on mastodon.If I'm writing something in Italian, I most likely have no interest in someone who does not understand Italian understand it.
Most definitely, I would not spend time to translate a message in several languages, I'd just write it in English.
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@rastinza @bitbonk @filobus I absolutely would, if given the tools. Similarly to you, I write in Italian for things I don't think will be of “international” interest, and in English for my “international” readership, but I would prefer to provide the Italian translation of my English/international posts *myself* rather than having my Italian readers who are not familiar enough with the English language to rely on a machine translation.
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@bitbonk @oblomov in my experience automatic translation has become good enough to be dangerous, in that it's great on the mundane stuff, and then catastrophically wrong on anything where actual terminology and precision are important.
so, yeah, if somebody is only looking at the pictures of fancy dresses I guess they can just use automatic translation of my sewing posts, but if they are actually interested in the sewing bits I suspect that they are better served by my own translations, thanks.
