#askFedi Does anybody know if there is an #ActivityPub software that *produces* multilingual objects leveraging the contentMap feature?
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@thisismissem @oblomov Oh right, I haven’t thought about that use case. Official institutions or companies that operate in different countries or have a multilingual audience, they probably want to localize their announcements etc.
But I guess we’d have to factor in that we’ll be getting more replies/interactions with such posts in different languages, which makes the availability of automatic translation to everyone more important.
bitbonk@mastodon.social said in #askFedi Does anybody know if there is an #ActivityPub software that *produces* multilingual objects leveraging the contentMap feature?:
> Oh right, I haven’t thought about that use case. Official institutions or companies that operate in different countries or have a multilingual audience, they probably want to localize their announcements etc.
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> But I guess we’d have to factor in that we’ll be getting more replies/interactions with such posts in different languages, which makes the availability of automatic translation to everyone more important.Yeah, actually sending and receiving multi-lingual posts is necessary for organisations that need to give equal access to content in multiple languages, but it's an advanced feature rather than a common thing done by regular folks. Basically they want to show their equality through communicating the same message to different communities, rather than having a separate language account or separate posts in different languages
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@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.
@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.
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#askFedi would you like to have the possibility to make multilingual posts, i.e. a *single* post/toot with the text available in multiple languages *at once*? Currently, you have to either do separate posts, or squeeze multiple languages within the character limit of your instance and only mark it for one of the languages (see e.g. https://sociale.network/@oblomov/110872023337803783 + https://sociale.network/@oblomov/114983566130691059).
The idea is interesting, but this problem would seem to be better solved by a built-in translator on the end user's side?
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#askFedi would you like to have the possibility to make multilingual posts, i.e. a *single* post/toot with the text available in multiple languages *at once*? Currently, you have to either do separate posts, or squeeze multiple languages within the character limit of your instance and only mark it for one of the languages (see e.g. https://sociale.network/@oblomov/110872023337803783 + https://sociale.network/@oblomov/114983566130691059).
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The idea is interesting, but this problem would seem to be better solved by a built-in translator on the end user's side?
@johan the built-in translator can work as a fallback when the author doesn't provide a translation in a given language, but is no substitute for the author's own words (assuming the author can write proficiently in the other language(s) as well).
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@bittersweetdb @pgcd wouldn't you rather prefer if the translation was provided by the author?
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@bittersweetdb @pgcd wouldn't you rather prefer if the translation was provided by the author?
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@bittersweetdb @pgcd of course it is not an obligation, but without the tools to do so, authors that want cannot.
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#askFedi would you like to have the possibility to make multilingual posts, i.e. a *single* post/toot with the text available in multiple languages *at once*? Currently, you have to either do separate posts, or squeeze multiple languages within the character limit of your instance and only mark it for one of the languages (see e.g. https://sociale.network/@oblomov/110872023337803783 + https://sociale.network/@oblomov/114983566130691059).
@oblomov I use client side translation when I can't make it out in the original language. I've seen some folks write multilingual posts already. I'm not sure what this feature would add? Just getting around character limits?
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@oblomov I use client side translation when I can't make it out in the original language. I've seen some folks write multilingual posts already. I'm not sure what this feature would add? Just getting around character limits?
@TheShellyTea each language would be an alternate “version” of the post, properly tagged by language. Think of it as something like an alt text for the text. So you see the post in your preferred language if that version is available, instead of seeing both texts together with only one indicated as the language of the post.
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