I've been using the chrome google translate extension for a few weeks now to translate foreign language posts in my feed. It has done an amazing job virtually every post seems to translate and the translation seems well enough to communicate and get the original intent.

How is this not a built-in mastodon feature!

#mastoadmin #mastodon #fediverse

@freemo

Doesnt @fedilab use DeepL to do this?

@selea @freemo Would that mean sharing non-public posts a node sees with a third-party? ATM, there're few open source solutions (Apertium, Moses) and none easy to integrate.

@lightone @selea Yes but keep in mind that is already possible since any end user viewer your feed might be running all sorts of stuff that passing information to a third party from the web sites they see. I mean anyone with the google translate plugin is already doing that but so is anyone who has ever translated posts in general or did a reverse image search or countless other things.

@freemo Yes. "P" is for "privacy" in FEDIVERSE ;) However, careless behaviour is one thing. A built-in feature encouraging to send en masse to a third-party is sort of against the spirit of Fedi. The main non-public posts to care about would be DMs

@lightone Agreed. Obviously the ideal way to implement this is to allow the end user to select whether they wish to translate non-public posts or not, that way if a user has the ability to respect other's wishes. I'd also personally add some way for a user to indicate ont heir profile a marker so they can opt-out ideally.