John~🐺

RE: translation feature requests: this is probably not going to happen - if it does, not for a long time. The financial risk is too high.

My response to this is also that while right now it may feel like a Tower of Babel, the nature of mastodon instances would suggest that communities will settle over time and this problem will alleviate itself. The most I can offer immediately is the ability to copy toot text so you may paste in a translator of your choosing

Apr 7, 2017 at 2:09amAmaroq
Show threadJessicaApr 7, 2017
@eurasierboy yeah, options for “copy toot text” would be good (heck, adding it to the system share sheet would be rad too!)
Show threadghost [inactive]Apr 7, 2017
@eurasierboy copying toot text is AWESOME for a million different reasons, and i think it's okay to expect people to paste into a translation app. what's the financial risk? do bing or google require some kind of investment to direct an app to use them?
Show threadJohn~🐺Apr 7, 2017
@ghost most translation API services have pricing models by the number of characters
Show threadghost [inactive]Apr 7, 2017
@eurasierboy holy crap i had no idea. that could cost a fortune. and i'm going to use it on twitter and FB way way WAY more often now.
Show threadnonesuchluckApr 7, 2017

@eurasierboy I'd love to see some metadata associated with each toot denoting language so I could filter out languages I don't understand.

Perhaps a user-level default setting, modifiable by a multi-select for individual toots? I've seen a good few bilingual toots, which is an interesting possibility enabled by longer character limit.

Show threadJohn~🐺Apr 7, 2017
@nonesuchluck should the API begin providing this, I would gladly reflect it in the UI
Show threadandrewApr 7, 2017

@eurasierboy Yeah, I feel like even if translation services were affordable, it would still be slow? Like, you request and get a set of statuses and then request a translation on those statuses and THEN show it.

You could pipeline it by overlapping the next fetch with the current translation, but then you have to do pipeline stall handling. It'd be intense.

Show threadJohn~🐺Apr 7, 2017
@Vavassor if I were to do it I would have to make it an opted action where a user would select to translate, in a pitiful attempt to keep its usage as minimal as possible. But yeah - even in optimal situations I don't see how it'd not be cumbersome at best, horrifyingly expensive and slow at worst
Show threadRamsey ✅ Apr 7, 2017
@eurasierboy Could toots be tagged with languages used (declared by too author) and people be able to filter their timelines for only a set of languages? sure it'll be imperfect, but possibly useful for some.
Show threadJohn~🐺Apr 7, 2017
@rwzh until the API supports such tagging and filtering, this will not be capable, sorry~
Show thread00SomethingApr 14, 2017
@eurasierboy why? Is it that of a problem to use google translate api?
Show threadJohn~🐺Apr 14, 2017
@00Something https://cloud.google.com/translate/pricing not paying for it 🙃
Show threadcharlag test accountApr 14, 2017
@eurasierboy on Android there's an option in Google translator that makes him translate anything from your clipboard in a tiny popup. so, copying is the key.
(also Yandex translator API has some wide limits of free use, I think they have English documentation)
Show threadJohn~🐺Apr 14, 2017
@charlag yeah, this is why I stress just providing a way to copy the text - let the user decide how they want to translate it
Show threadBrookeApr 14, 2017
@eurasierboy Copy toot would be great, and certainly all that the app needs to do regarding a multilingual web. The rest is up to us.
Show threadJohn~🐺Apr 14, 2017
@anummabrooke just waiting on Apple to review and copy will be yours 👌
Show threadSamantha VealliApr 15, 2017
@eurasierboy that'd be super convenient and not fill up our camera roll so much haha