38
[Ask Europe] People speaking languages with a small population on Lemmy, how do you deal with the dilemma of posting in English or in your other language? (jlai.lu)
submitted 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) by Servais@jlai.lu to c/yurop@lemm.ee
41 comments fedilink hide all child comments

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.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[-] M500@lemmy.ml 1 points 7 months ago

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.

[-] guyrocket@kbin.social 1 points 7 months ago

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.

[-] M500@lemmy.ml 1 points 7 months ago

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.

[-] guyrocket@kbin.social 1 points 7 months ago

How would you design a Lemmy/kbin app to do this?

[-] M500@lemmy.ml 1 points 7 months ago

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

[-] Servais@jlai.lu 1 points 7 months ago

I guess even with translators, there are cultural references and jokes that are difficult to convey. Could still be interesting!

[-] guyrocket@kbin.social 3 points 7 months ago

Even "normal" translation is imperfect. It would be very important to be patient and keep an open mind.

this post was submitted on 13 Feb 2024
38 points (95.2% liked)

YUROP

1139 readers
102 users here now

A laid back community for good news, pictures and general discussions among people living in Europe.

Other European communities

Other casual communities:

Language communities

Cities

Countries

founded 7 months ago
MODERATORS
BoozeOrWater@lemm.ee
anzo@programming.dev
qaz@lemmy.world