I think it would be great to be able to click a button on a comment\post and have it translate to your language. I think its possible to build a way to include this in a privacy respecting way (im not a coder so forgive my ignorance) if we use something like the google translate scraper that is used for this privacy respecting google translate frontend https://github.com/thedaviddelta/lingva-translate
Making it easier for people to communicate across languages would be pretty sweet for the fediverse.
Honestly? I think it’s not worth the trouble. It sounds cool but we’re better off without it
How come?? May you please elaborate?
Very difficult to implement and potentially little reward. I’m not convinced the community would benefit much from a bunch of machine translation. I think the expectation is reasonable that people will gather in communities based on the languages they know so if you have speakers of Italian on Lemmy, for example, they will use an Italian instance or Italian communities. This is already well supported by the software.
If people from different linguistic backgrounds need to communicate using a common language, the best choice would be Esperanto.
Toki Pona might be better just because it uses more common sounds and less of them. Might be easier to learn and speak from a background like Cantonese or something. Isn’t Esperanto very euro-centric?
Euro centric is a loaded term. It’s a kind of Indo European language but most people on Earth speak an IE language so it’s the most efficient route.
only European branches of Indo European. It’s a mix of Germanic, Slavic, and Romance. if that’s not eurocentric, in an objective way, i don’t know what is
Slavic is in the Satem branch so it’s defeinitely Asian. However, a language merely being European doesn’t make it bad or unsuitable. It was the best choice at the time and continues to be the best choice
modern slavic languages have a lot more in common with other european languages than they do with farsi or hindi, even if they were in the same branch as them at an extremely early stage of their development
i agree esperanto is the best choice for a universal language, but only because it’s already established and the grammar is easy to understand for speakers of any language. but if we could go back and change some things, or if modern esperantists were willing to replace a bunch of vocabulary, it would need to have arabic, indic and sinitic influences to truly be considered a universal language
It’s called Persian language, and actually even now there’s lots of notable similarities between them. Even so, family relationship is not that important (as you said) in determining how useful Esperanto is or isn’t. On the one hand, any regular auxlang regardless of its roots will be better than any natlang. In my view, Esperanto did something very smart by taking advantage of an already-established legacy by piggybacking off of Latin and its successors in Europe.
Of course you are right about the “already established” part. Some people mistakenly think that Esperanto is a project, like a new idea for creating a language. It’s already created and the work is all done, so Esperanto is a complete package ready to go. Just plug and play.
I strongly disagree with the point though, that just throwing in vocab from languages like Hindi, Chinese, and Arabic somehow makes the language better or more universal. If anything it would make Esperanto much less coherent and less able to take advantage of the backwards compatibility and legacy stuff that helps with onboarding. Just as an example, translation from English to Esperanto is very easy because of the lexical and grammatical proximity, so a transition from English (globally dominant now) to Esperanto would be a very fast and smooth one. You’d have a larger amount of better quality translations in the shortest possible time span to help people eliminate the need for English and the other “power” languages like Spanish, French, and Russian, which are similarly close to Esperanto. In that way, Esperanto theoretically is an ideal killer of those languages.