#askFedi Does anybody know if there is an #ActivityPub software that *produces* multilingual objects leveraging the contentMap feature?
#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.)
#poll #internationalization #languages
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.
@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.
@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.
@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.