I often reply under Japanese posts, and I always assume users will use a translator as I do, but maybe in the context of a Japanese instance or conversation this may look rude?
I often reply under Japanese posts, and I always assume users will use a translator as I do, but maybe in the context of a Japanese instance or conversation this may look rude?
nah, it’s better for information integrity to reply in the language you understand imo, comments translated using translator services are very obvious anyway and some people are multilingual
I wonder, then, if the move is to type your comment, run it through a translator yourself, then post both? I saw that move a lot on Rednote before it added its own translator.
Sure, I agree? Maybe there’s a misunderstanding here and I should add that it simply would never even occur to me to enter a conversation if I didn’t natively understand the language that’s being used.
ActivityPub has a feature where most post objects can actually have different language representations within one item. On a protocol level, MissKey/Mastodon/Lemmy can have the same message in different languages, and the client can pick the one to display. Unfortunately, I’ve never seen anyone make use of it. Seems like a waste. If used, users with their display language set to German/Japanese will see the “machine translated:” post first, and people with English as a language will see the original. English first, and good implementations would allow the user to switch languages to compare.
On xiaohongshu before the translate feature people would write in both languages for ease of translation and so the other side wouldn’t have to translate it themselves.
That’s probably the best situation especially when we don’t have text limits.
It was however hilarious watching everyone find out in realtime just how bad Google translator is for Chinese and literally everyone having to swap to GPT or DeepL.