FediTips has moved!Feb 25, 2023

Mastodon supports 96 different languages and dialects.

You can choose your interface language, filter your timelines by language, and say which languages you post in. There's also a built-in automatic translation system on some servers (depending on whether your admin has switched it on).

It's important to set your posting language as this is what allows the language filters and automatic translation systems to work.

You can find out how to do all these things at:

➡️ https://fedi.tips/setting-your-language-preferences-on-mastodon-and-filtering-out-posts-in-other-languages

Setting your language preferences on Mastodon, filtering out posts in other languages, filtering search results by language | Fedi.Tips – An Unofficial Guide to Mastodon and the Fediverse

An unofficial guide to using Mastodon and the Fediverse

Show threadStephen GreenhamFeb 25, 2023
@feditips I wish as a mod on a server where I have translation turned on I could manually change some people's post language... It's infuriating when someone has their post that is in another language, marked as English, and then I can't translate it :(
Show threadMrClonFeb 25, 2023

@solarisfire i wish post language selector was more convenient (and may be had some auto-detection). I post in two languages and sometime (most of the time) forget to set correct post language

@feditips

Show threadStephen GreenhamFeb 25, 2023
@MrClon @feditips I don't think it could be placed any more conveniently on the web client, but in some other third-party clients, it's pretty much non-existent. Auto-detection would be perfect. I wonder if it would be possible to run something periodically server side that looks through the statuses table, guesses the language of the status, and then updates the language column :/
Show threadBraw ☕🏳️‍🌈Feb 25, 2023

@solarisfire mastodon used to have auto-detection, but it was pretty inaccurate, so it was removed in favour of manual language selection.

Personally I think a mix of both definitely would be good: language gets detected as you type and if it's not correct then you can override it. But I don't think there's a way to ship language detection to client easily.

Good thing you can change the language while editing the post.

@MrClon @feditips

Show threadMrClon
@brawaru @solarisfire @feditips i suspect language detection can work good if algorithm know set of languages that user can use. e.g. user select japanese and english as his language, so autodetection will not assume that post written in chinese
Feb 25, 2023 at 8:26pmWeb