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is there a universal translator for Lemmy? (lemmy.dbzer0.com)
submitted 11 months ago by Melatonin@lemmy.dbzer0.com to c/asklemmy@lemmy.ml
30 comments fedilink hide all child comments

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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[-] drem@lemmy.world 23 points 11 months ago

Most translators aren't perfect, they generally can not understand context

[-] otter@lemmy.ca 8 points 11 months ago

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 11 months ago

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 11 months ago

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

[-] Cysioland@lemmygrad.ml 3 points 11 months 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 11 months ago

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

[-] PlexSheep@feddit.de 5 points 11 months ago

Especially in language that intentionally leave things obvious from context out, like japanese.

[-] jeena@jemmy.jeena.net 16 points 11 months ago

Firefox already has a build in translator you can just let it translate for you so you at least could read what they're writing at least for the languages supported it's really cool because it's a offline translation.

I live in Korea and Korean is not supported, also google translate doesn't work on Korean websites so I use https://github.com/translate-tools/linguist/ which allows me to translate from Korean to English.

[-] mp3@lemmy.ca 4 points 11 months ago

It'd be really nice if the Bergamot translation project that Mozilla uses becomes big enough that it ends up being used in other apps as well. That'd be cool if you could get the engine as a mobile app and the apps could simply send a local translation request to it.

[-] Kraivo@lemmy.world 8 points 11 months ago

Don't know german, still enjoying the hell out of ich_erl

[-] neumast@lemmy.world 3 points 11 months ago

It's "ich_iel" on feddit.de

[-] CannotSleep420@lemmygrad.ml 8 points 11 months ago

I made a translator bot that uses the DeepL API. Allow me to demonstrate...

[-] CannotSleep420@lemmygrad.ml 1 points 11 months ago
[-] TranslatorBot@lemmygrad.ml 1 points 11 months ago

ÜbersetzungIch habe einen Übersetzer-Bot erstellt, der die DeepL API verwendet. Erlauben Sie mir, das zu demonstrieren...

Dieser Text wurde mit DeepL übersetzt.

[-] tetris11@lemmy.ml 1 points 11 months ago
[-] TranslatorBot@lemmygrad.ml 1 points 11 months ago

translationI have created a translator bot that uses the DeepL API. Allow me to demonstrate...

*This text was translated with DeepL.

This text was translated using DeepL.

[-] tetris11@lemmy.ml 1 points 11 months ago
[-] TranslatorBot@lemmygrad.ml 1 points 11 months ago

::: Spoiler Çeviri DeepL API'sini kullanan bir çevirmen botu yaptım. Göstermeme izin verin... :::

Bu metin DeepL kullanılarak çevrilmiştir.

[-] TheGalacticVoid@lemm.ee 1 points 11 months ago

@TranslatorBot@lemmygrad.ml Español

[-] TranslatorBot@lemmygrad.ml 1 points 11 months ago

Traducción
Spoiler Traducción Hice un bot traductor que utiliza la API DeepL, déjame mostrarte ... :::

*Este texto fue traducido usando DeepL. :::

Este texto ha sido traducido con DeepL.

[-] TheGalacticVoid@lemm.ee 1 points 11 months ago

@TranslatorBot@lemmygrad.ml Inglés

[-] TranslatorBot@lemmygrad.ml 1 points 11 months ago

Translation
Spoiler Translation I made a translator bot that uses the DeepL API, let me show you ... :::

*This text was translated using DeepL. :::

*This text was translated using DeepL. :::.

This text was translated using DeepL.

[-] Candelestine@lemmy.world 5 points 11 months ago

I think the future is probably going to resolve this one in time, and not that much time either. I don't see why LLM technology shouldn't eventually be able to perform adequate real-time translation, it's just a matter of continuing to develop the process.

Some languages will be more difficult than others, and translation will always be imperfect. But we don't need perfection, just better than our current fairly meh (but still impressively not bad) tools.

[-] lily33@lemm.ee 3 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

Actually, it is already able to perform high quality translation. But it's too expensive right now to use at scale.

[-] taladar@sh.itjust.works 3 points 11 months ago

It will always struggle, as would a human translator. The concept of a perfect translation itself is just not achievable since languages are not just word-swapped copies of each other where each target language word has the exact same meaning as its counter-part in the source language.

[-] PositiveNoise@kbin.social 4 points 11 months ago

Kbin and Lemmy etc should simply allow options for preferred languages, and people can select whatever they prefer. Giving them the option to not see posts or see translated posts should work out fine. I bet this problem get resolved eventually. In the meantime, I'm not too bothered by blocking magazines/communities that are non-english. No biggie.

[-] dfyx@lemmy.helios42.de 4 points 11 months ago

In Lemmy, you can choose your languages under Settings -> Languages. The main problem is that Lemmy currently doesn't have any mechanism to automatically determine a post's language and instead relies on users to set the language for each post and comment. Therefore most content is marked as "Undetermined".

[-] synae 2 points 11 months ago

Seems like submitting a post should require setting a language for it :/ No need to "determine" the language when the submitter can simply note what it is. The default for the field could even be their set profile language to make it easier.

[-] sab@kbin.social 1 points 11 months ago

This is already supported in kbin! Press your icon in the top right corner and enter the settings, and select the languages you're interested in under the "Filter languages of threads and posts" setting (somewhat counter-intuitively under the "Appearance" heading). Seems to be working great for me at least :)

[-] booty@hexbear.net 1 points 11 months ago

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?

That would be really cool, unfortunately there is no translation software anywhere near that robust. Translation is a difficult and complicated job even for humans, and it's one of those jobs that is way harder for computers than it is for us.

this post was submitted on 20 Nov 2023
48 points (87.5% liked)

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