@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.

@apicultor several clients already do that, and it can work as a fallback if the author doesn't provide a translation of their own, but what I'm talking about here is the possibility to author multilingual posts directly, which several people do already, but through impractical gimmicks like the ones I mentioned in the poll post.

@oblomov @filobus @valhalla @Puxi i don't want this feature because people will provide text with different meanings in different languages. Let's say put a witty clever take in English and blattant hate speech in French. So English reader will retoot and give visibility to hate in good faith.

It's just like alt text don't assume people will make good usage of a feature just because it exists

@thaumiel999 I responded here https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/11013#issuecomment-3448312779, but the short of it is:

* authors should be allowed to write multilingual content with proper metadata, regardless of the content form (blog, microblog, image description, video subtitles or anything else);
* even with extreme cases like the one you mention, a multilingual post is still going to be more lightweight than any multimedia content
* multilingual posts are more efficient than the current workarounds.

@filobus @Uilebheist a single multilingual post is less expensive, both on-network and on-disk, than the workarounds people currently have to go through to achieve comparable effects (poorly).

@bitbonk ActivityPub already has this feature (see contentMap etc, which Mastodon *already* uses, but only for a single language, unnecessarily duplicating content). And no automatic translation will ever be a good substitute of the author's own words.
The UI can be enabled only for those who want it.

@lutindiscret @filobus @valhalla @Puxi my poll currently has a 60%+ of people interested in the feature. The kind of abusive behavior you mention would be a bannable offence, dealt through moderation like any form of abusive use of the platform. And just like alt text, we should not reject a positive feature only because some may not make good use of it.

Interesting, from the comments I'm seeing, this feature seems more controversial than I expected. There seems to be in particular a crowd that seriously believes client-side translations to be a superior alternative to the author's own words, rather than an “extrema ratio” fallback for untranslated content.

I'm starting to see why Google has been pushing that autotranslated crap on YouTube, the AI brainrot is already dramatically widespread.