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is there a universal translator for Lemmy? (lemmy.dbzer0.com)

submitted 1 year ago by Melatonin@lemmy.dbzer0.com to c/asklemmy@lemmy.ml

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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?

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[–] otter@lemmy.ca 8 points 1 year ago (3 children)

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 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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.ca 2 points 1 year ago

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

[–] Cysioland@lemmygrad.ml 3 points 1 year 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

[–] argentcorvid@midwest.social 1 points 1 year ago

Mastodon has support for this. some instances have it enabled.