One of the most requested features on Mastodon is a built-in language translation system, where you can click on a post and it automatically translates it into your language.
If this is important to you, and if you are comfortable using Github, please give this issue a thumbs up to let the developers know that this feature is wanted:
https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/9690
(I thought this was already being worked on, but I cannot find any official announcements saying this.)
@feditips Only if it doesn't use e.g. Google. I'm extremely skeeved out by the thought of people having a built-in button to violate our privacy.
To give some context, it must be the most common question I got asked when the big new wave of members joined: where's the translate button? It's like people just expect it to be there.
Whether or not it is more useful through a browser, people are looking for it in Mastodon itself (shrug)
@feditips @matt I'm probably gonna go thumbs-/down/ it (assuming it uses some cloud service) 'cause, yeah, not cool.
Better to explain to people that it's not really a good thing to ship people's private discussions to Google. (And yeah private discussions do happen on here, followers-only scope is great.)
I am assuming it would be run by someone connected to Mastodon.
The third party Mastodon app Fedilab (@apps)has actually gone ahead and set up its own instance, you can try it here:
It works in the Fedilab app too.
@feditips @matt People are going to be running this on our posts on /their/ instances, so what's important is that it runs /on their instance/ so /they're/ not shipping our posts off to someone else. It's not like we have control of what their server uses.
And I would've said it's not realistic, except Firefox's extension suddenly appeared. It would still take a lot of work to make it run serverside though.
But, better /no builtin translations at all/ than any sort of third party like this.
If someone copies and pastes our posts into some service, then it's their fault. If they just click a button and give away our posts, it's Masto's. And it'd presumably be a lot more common when it's an official feature.