Interesting, from the comments I'm seeing, this feature seems more controversial than I expected. There seems to be in particular a crowd that seriously believes client-side translations to be a superior alternative to the author's own words, rather than an “extrema ratio” fallback for untranslated content.

I'm starting to see why Google has been pushing that autotranslated crap on YouTube, the AI brainrot is already dramatically widespread.

@oblomov From the UX perspektive Mastdon is already quite … involved. Adding yet another options doesn’t make it better.

@bitbonk any additional UI elements can be hidden behind a preference, so people that post monolingual can do so without seeing anything different, and people who wish to post multilingual can do so.

I can appreciate the worry about the potential of abuse from people hiding bannable offences in the translations, and how this could make work more difficult for moderators, but I don't share the pessimism: even now, if anything gets into the timeline in a language that isn't understood by the moderators, they're unable to make easily an informed decision. Those tools remain in place, and the report form can include (auto-filled) information about the language for which it is being sent.

@oblomov Yes, I understand that. It is still added complexity for users, client implementers/designers and mastodon maintainers for (in my eyes) little benefit.

@bitbonk how is it added complexity for users, when they won't see it if they don't explicitly request it?

@oblomov User have yet another option in their settings they might not understand or misunderstand. They might have trouble finding the actual settings they are looking for because there are so many settings. Also clients might not even hide it behind a setting because it is just easier to throw a new button on post UI.

@bitbonk I'm a staunch antagonist of dumbing down program features because some users may find them confusing.

bitbonk@mastodon.social said in #askFedi Does anybody know if there is an #ActivityPub software that *produces* multilingual objects leveraging the contentMap feature?:
> oblomov@sociale.network Honestly, automatic translation has become so good that I doubt it‘s worth adding this complexity to Mastodon/ActivityPub. The UI for making posts already has too many option and buttons and stuff.
>Translation can and should be a concern of the client. It works very well elsewhere.

So you would do this if you've specifically a multi-lingual audience, e.g., governments posting about stuff, politicians, unions and leaders of them, etc. But for the average throw away microblogging post it's not really necessary

@thisismissem @oblomov Oh right, I haven’t thought about that use case. Official institutions or companies that operate in different countries or have a multilingual audience, they probably want to localize their announcements etc.

But I guess we’d have to factor in that we’ll be getting more replies/interactions with such posts in different languages, which makes the availability of automatic translation to everyone more important.

@bitbonk @oblomov @filobus
I'm not against the introduction of such a feature. But I would not use this.
I write in English things that I want for the wider public and which are more general. I write in Italian and Spanish things that I refer towards Italian and Spanish circles on mastodon.

If I'm writing something in Italian, I most likely have no interest in someone who does not understand Italian understand it.

Most definitely, I would not spend time to translate a message in several languages, I'd just write it in English.

@rastinza @bitbonk @filobus I absolutely would, if given the tools. Similarly to you, I write in Italian for things I don't think will be of “international” interest, and in English for my “international” readership, but I would prefer to provide the Italian translation of my English/international posts *myself* rather than having my Italian readers who are not familiar enough with the English language to rely on a machine translation.

bitbonk@mastodon.social said in #askFedi Does anybody know if there is an #ActivityPub software that *produces* multilingual objects leveraging the contentMap feature?:
> Oh right, I haven’t thought about that use case. Official institutions or companies that operate in different countries or have a multilingual audience, they probably want to localize their announcements etc.
>
> But I guess we’d have to factor in that we’ll be getting more replies/interactions with such posts in different languages, which makes the availability of automatic translation to everyone more important.

Yeah, actually sending and receiving multi-lingual posts is necessary for organisations that need to give equal access to content in multiple languages, but it's an advanced feature rather than a common thing done by regular folks. Basically they want to show their equality through communicating the same message to different communities, rather than having a separate language account or separate posts in different languages

@bitbonk @oblomov in my experience automatic translation has become good enough to be dangerous, in that it's great on the mundane stuff, and then catastrophically wrong on anything where actual terminology and precision are important.

so, yeah, if somebody is only looking at the pictures of fancy dresses I guess they can just use automatic translation of my sewing posts, but if they are actually interested in the sewing bits I suspect that they are better served by my own translations, thanks.