Hey, thank you for this instance and this space, it is a great work.
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One person tried to comment in one of my post, he received the “undetermined language” error, but selecting spanish he could comment successfully.
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I am trying to comment to the same person, but when I try to avoid the “undetermined language” error (still present) choosing an option, there is no another option to pick.
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I tried to modify the language of my community to see if this has effect in the comment mechanisms, but i can not select another option apart of “undetermined language”, choosing spanish or english does not has effect.
What should I do?
I think the entire language “feature” is useless anyway.
I don’t think it’s useless. It will enable automatic translation of posts and such, especially in multi-language communities. Say, a country or language specific community in which both native speakers and international users want to be able to participate in. There is likely points to be made for accessibility reasons as well, though I lack knowledge in that department. The feature just needs to be fleshed out properly.
Most translaters have a Recognize function nowadays. And that function doesn’t check for the actual content of the text, just for what you selected…
First, manual selection. Soon, auto detection.
And this is just a guess but I imagine auto detection can still fail sometimes. Say you quote a portion of an article that’s in a different language, or you include a code block with mostly English keywords while the rest of the post is in French or something.
Being able to manually select a language still makes sense to me.
The language selection makes no sense, most people speak English on the internet and communitys that don’t, don’t want non language speakers to participate normally anyway its just annoying and Promotes monolingualism, wich leads to Alzheimers.
I believe it’s mostly just poor translation from microblogging world that doesn’t have communities/groups per se. What really should be done in Lemmy is user setting of show/hide foreign language posts, defaulting to show. That would keep feeds/walls on other platforms that are part of fediverse working as intended while people that want forum-centric view and come to Lemmy happy.
Also I think you are gravely underestimating amount of non-English speaking people on internet.
Englisch is the language equivalent to a Club, its easy to lear easy to use and very basic with not much depth, if i would be suggesting everyone to learn German your argument would be 100% agreeable, but English is easy and its always good to learn something, its actually helping to make Alzheimers less likely.
But i understand where you are coming from and i don’t think that would be a bad idea by default.
Please pause and consider how the British Empire exported English all over the world, often by force, leading to its privileged status among languages today. Also consider that all people have different aptitudes for learning, and even a single individual will have vastly different abilities at different times in their life.
I’m only fluent in English, but that doesn’t make other languages invalid in any way. People who don’t speak English have just as much right to enjoy the internet as I do.
There are certainly ways Lemmy could handle languages better, and I hope to see improvements. But the tool should be what does the work, not the end-users.
