@oblomov 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.

@apicultor several clients already do that, and it can work as a fallback if the author doesn't provide a translation of their own, but what I'm talking about here is the possibility to author multilingual posts directly, which several people do already, but through impractical gimmicks like the ones I mentioned in the poll post.

@oblomov @filobus My guess is that only 0.1% of users would ever use this feature. But the additional UI for it would probably be forced upon everyone.
In many cases I also expect that the manual translation of a non-native speaker is worse than an automatic translation. I see this regularly happen here at work.

@oblomov @filobus @valhalla @Puxi i don't want this feature because people will provide text with different meanings in different languages. Let's say put a witty clever take in English and blattant hate speech in French. So English reader will retoot and give visibility to hate in good faith.

It's just like alt text don't assume people will make good usage of a feature just because it exists

@helge @nlnet I wrote something up in my comment to the Mastodon issue https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/11013#issuecomment-3447834033

I'm not sure if it's sufficient as a starting point, though.

@thaumiel999 I responded here https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/11013#issuecomment-3448312779, but the short of it is:

* authors should be allowed to write multilingual content with proper metadata, regardless of the content form (blog, microblog, image description, video subtitles or anything else);
* even with extreme cases like the one you mention, a multilingual post is still going to be more lightweight than any multimedia content
* multilingual posts are more efficient than the current workarounds.

@filobus @Uilebheist a single multilingual post is less expensive, both on-network and on-disk, than the workarounds people currently have to go through to achieve comparable effects (poorly).

@bitbonk ActivityPub already has this feature (see contentMap etc, which Mastodon *already* uses, but only for a single language, unnecessarily duplicating content). And no automatic translation will ever be a good substitute of the author's own words.
The UI can be enabled only for those who want it.

@lutindiscret @filobus @valhalla @Puxi my poll currently has a 60%+ of people interested in the feature. The kind of abusive behavior you mention would be a bannable offence, dealt through moderation like any form of abusive use of the platform. And just like alt text, we should not reject a positive feature only because some may not make good use of it.

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.