oblomov@sociale.network I believe WordPress does (pfefferle@mastodon.social)

You can see it in action on notiz.blog and I think maybe the Vivaldi blog (they have Japanese contributors)

@julian @pfefferle

I should clarify that by multilingual I mean the *same* object being available in multiple languages, not separate objects (e.g. posts) for each language (so the contentMap would have to have multiple entires). I checked some samples and this doesn't seem to be used (at least): each post is a separate object.

#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).

#poll #internationalization #languages

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.

@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 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.)

@oblomov @valhalla @Puxi yes, I'm not against it, I too write in Italian OR an awful English, and writing in both I tried and found it awkward
Maybe I overreacted to you finding appalling using client side translation, I find client side translation still awkward too

@filobus @valhalla @Puxi I'm not against client-side translations as a matter of principle. I am against their existence as a reason to not allow authors to provide their own translations.

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.)

#internationalization #languages

@oblomov Post like https://no.fedimeteo.com/trondheim/p/1761455314.991738 might benefit from using multilingual objects

@aslakr yeah, the recent conversation on the possibility to make the fedimeteo posts more international is exactly what triggered this thread in the first place 8-) Of course in that case the _production_ side is up to the platform used by fedimeteo, which is snac, but Mastodon being at least able to properly present such posts would be very useful.

@oblomov Why not have an option for machine translation of posts while reading?

@oblomov @filobus Also, it's a way to stop wasting energy and compute power on doing the same thing all over again.
Which I understand some people prefer otherwise these poor fossil fuels companies might get less money or something.

@oblomov 저는 워드프레스에서 contentMap에 접근하는 방식에 대해 이슈를 작성했습니다.

Do you want to include multiple language versions when publishing an article of more than 7,000 characters in WordPress?
If you include 14 language versions, a single `Create` activity would contain about **98,000 characters** of content — and every time you update one of those localized versions, the `Update` activities will keep accumulating.

https://github.com/Automattic/wordpress-activitypub/issues/2257

@Uilebheist @oblomov there's an engineering problem for which I have no clues, one system (software translation) needs computing energy (locally I hope), but for how many people? The other (multiple language messages) need one translator and many transmissions across networks, for all servers involved (compression can help maybe) (it could be a problem only if all start sending multiple messages)

@oblomov What I mean is: microblogging isn’t Wikipedia, and traffic isn’t free.
Make active use of automatic translation instead.

@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.