I find myself blocking a lot of foreign communities just because they’re foreign. It feels wrong and unnecessary. This is the future isn’t it?

If I set my settings to English why can’t I just use Lemmy in English and never know that the person I’m chatting to is doing so in German and they never know that I’m doing so in English?

  • drem@lemmy.world
    23·
    8 months ago

    Most translators aren’t perfect, they generally can not understand context

    • Otter@lemmy.caEnglish
      8·
      8 months ago

      A solution could be to have it run on request. Reddit doesn’t even have that, it could be a cool new tool

      Run an open source translation engine, and have a 'translate to account language’s button. It could do one of

      • run locally on your machine (like Firefox’s translations), you have to redo it if you load the page again. Doesn’t need any server reconfiguration
      • runs on the server, and the result is cached. Anyone looking for that language for that comment in the future can get it instantly
      • runs on all content on the server, for a preset selection of languages. Might be more efficient in the long run
      • taladar@sh.itjust.works
        9·
        8 months ago

        I don’t know about others but I certainly don’t want one “account language”. As someone who speaks both English and German I want content in both languages to be accessible to me directly without a translator and if I do want content translated it probably varies by the quality of the translation which one i prefer.

        • Otter@lemmy.caEnglish
          2·
          7 months ago

          Fair enough, maybe a checkbox section in the settings for which languages to list?

      • Cysioland@lemmygrad.ml
        3·
        8 months ago

        Mastodon handles it by allowing you to hook up DeepL API which is free up to a certain point. I run it on my single-user Mastodon instance and it works well, you get a translate button like on The Site Formerly Known As Twitter

    • PlexSheep@feddit.de
      5·
      8 months ago

      Especially in language that intentionally leave things obvious from context out, like japanese.