this post was submitted on 13 Feb 2024
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[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 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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Basically, that's it.

I'm a French speaker, so I try to participate mainly on the French speaking communities such as [email protected], [email protected], [email protected], 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 [email protected], 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.

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 months ago (2 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 months ago (1 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 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

[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 months ago (1 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 3 points 9 months ago

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