Loomio
Wed 16 Mar 2016 1:53AM

Built-in Translation to Remove Language Barriers

JD Joel Desermeau Public Seen by 116

Since diaspora has many different users who speak many different languages, I find myself not being able to understand many posts.

Built-in translation could be diaspora's "killer app"

JD

Joel Desermeau Wed 16 Mar 2016 1:59AM

Perhaps this might be a good resource: http://fosmt.org/

G

goob Thu 17 Mar 2016 6:34PM

Have you searched for previous issues regarding this? Because there are some.

JD

Joel Desermeau Sat 19 Mar 2016 4:22AM

I did a cursory search but found nothing. I'll be more thorough in the future.

G

goob Sun 20 Mar 2016 11:21AM

Keep in mind that Loomio's search facility only returns results from the sub-groups that you have joined (which is slightly annoying). So if you're not a member of sub-groups in which such a proposal is likely to have been posted, such as 'Feature Proposals', you'd need to look manually through the threads in that sub-group to find any previous discussion (which is slightly more annoying!).

JD

Joel Desermeau Thu 24 Mar 2016 7:11PM

Okay, thanks for the heads up!

FL

Frode Lindeijer Sun 26 Jun 2016 4:30PM

I totally agree on this and maybe Loomio should be top priority to have this implemented, for democratic reasons. :)
I'd say this function should avoid Google Translate by having the pods handle the translations, for privacy reasons.

Until then there is browser plug-ins like Translate This and Instant Translate. The best option is always to learn the language, Instant Translate could help in this with its double click translate (needs to be enabled).

Could this somehow be moved to Feature Proposals?

C

Chris Mon 27 Jun 2016 5:27PM

Most of those browser add-ons still use Google Translate, unfortunately. And when I say 'most', I mean 'good luck finding one that doesn't.' Instant Translate, which you mentioned, appears to be closed-source. I would love to see a browser extension that uses Apertium.

This is what I've been using. And it seems to work alright. The reviews report a lot of odd behavior, and the possibility that it does not respect privacy. Personally, I have not noticed any of these issues. However, you could chalk that up to the fact that I'm not on Windows, and have fairly heavy privacy controls.

While I fully support the idea of auto-translating on Diaspora*, it really seems like a moonshot kind of effort. I want it eventually, but adding translation to all the other things pods are doing would be computationally expensive.

FL

Frode Lindeijer Mon 27 Jun 2016 11:18PM

How about supporting multi-lingual posts? The one posting the message could do the translation himself, picking his target audience and removing errors by hand.
I think there was the proposal for specific language tags as well, which would fit into this.
This way the pod could eventually do the remaining translations during otherwise idle time (with some settings for the podmin). The order of translation could be based on anonymous statistics on network wide language preferences and post time.

BA

Bernardas Ališauskas Sun 17 Jul 2016 12:46PM

I really like the idea of user specifying the language of the post during it's creation. The obvious advantage of this would be --

Filtering - ability to filter non-english posts would be brilliant, even with the best translation services available the post quality would be questionable at best and promoting some sort of discussion through translated text would be difficult to say the least.

I think translations would be a huge undertaking and simple feature like the one described above could be a really quick fix that would increase the user experience tremendously. Seriously /public is completely impossible to browse and good luck having a healthy social community when people can't discover anyone to communicate with...

Edit: I've made a little mockup to illustrate this:
mockup