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.
There are fully FOSS translation projects, like Argos Translate.
LibreTranslate is based on it. You can self-host it and make use of its API.
oh wow nice I didn’t know this existed, thanks!
I would suggest the Mastodon way, choosing the language you are writing your post and additional tabs for different languages or, as additional suggesting, using LibreTranslate instead of relying in propietary services.
It’s a cool idea that would come handy. But should it be implemented on the front-end or on the back-end?
maybe someone can make a community for translated posts. Per language maybe
finally a good post
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
