Basically, that’s it.
I’m a French speaker, so I try to participate mainly on the French speaking communities such as !forumlibre@jlai.lu, !rance@jlai.lu, !cineseries@jlai.lu, but the issue is that apart from the 2-3 top ones, the others are usually very quiet.
I know it’s a chicken and egg problem (as you need content for people to come and participate), but for instance with movies, I’m always torn between posting the content in the French-speaking community, or the much larger !movies@lemm.ee, where I know that the audience is much bigger. Same for science, history, most topics actually.
I don’t expect anyone to have a magical formula (the most obvious solution being just having more speakers of that language on Lemmy), but I was curious to see if other people in the same situation had insights to share.
Native English speaker here that is conversational in Spanish and learning Filipino.
I sometimes and interested in what people of other languages have to say, but if there is not an easy way to translate it in the app, I’ll just skip it.
Don’t really comes down to who you want your audience to be.
Since the app I use for Lemmy does not have translation built in, I’ll never read what you post in French. If it’s in Spanish, I’ll attempt to read it.
This is interesting. Are there apps that translate? Latest version of Libre Wolf on my PC tries to translate web pages for me. But I think that only does 1 language at a time.
The idea of a “babelfish” app for social media seems like it could open conversion up across languages. I wonder if anyone is working on this.
It would be great to be able to converse with any group in all of their languages.
There are a lot of different translations apps out there. iOS even has translation built into the OS. I’m not sure why it’s not a standard feature in these apps. Maybe there isn’t a decent api for it.
I think meta text has a translate feature, but it’s not obvious to find.
How would you design a Lemmy/kbin app to do this?
It seems Apple has an api that can detect and translate languages. Google and Microsoft also have one too.
I’m not an iOS developer, but there could be a few options to implement this feature.
Each message could be analyzed for the language and if it’s not the target language and is a supported language then just translate it.
You could have a button on the post that you can click to have it analyze through text and then translate it.
https://developer.apple.com/documentation/applicationservices/translation?ssp=1&darkschemeovr=1&setlang=en&cc=PH&safesearch=moderate
I guess even with translators, there are cultural references and jokes that are difficult to convey. Could still be interesting!
Even “normal” translation is imperfect. It would be very important to be patient and keep an open mind.