I'm a French speaker, so I try to participate mainly on the French speaking communities such as !forumlibre@jlai.lu, !rance@jlai.lu, !cineseries@jlai.lu, 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 !movies@lemm.ee, 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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[–] guyrocket@kbin.social 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.

[–] M500@lemmy.ml 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.

[–] guyrocket@kbin.social 1 points 9 months ago (1 children)

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

[–] M500@lemmy.ml 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

[–] Servais@jlai.lu 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!

[–] guyrocket@kbin.social 3 points 9 months ago

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