Comment on Is it rude to reply using English under posts in a language you can’t speak?
splendoruranium@infosec.pub 2 weeks ago
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 this may look rude?
Can’t speak for others (obviously, as this is about individual etiquette perceptions) but I would consider it to be polite to only enter conversations with unknown parties in languages that the parties have shown to be capable of speaking and understanding.
Using a new language entering a conversation would therefore signal either familiarity (“I know they understand me”) or rudeness (“I don’t care if they understand me”) to me, I suppose.
Jumuta@sh.itjust.works 2 weeks ago
nah, it’s better for information integrity to reply in the language you understand imo, comments translated using translator services are very obvious anyway
recently_Coco@lemmy.blahaj.zone 2 weeks ago
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.
splendoruranium@infosec.pub 2 weeks ago
Sure, I agree? Maybe there’s a misunderstanding here. Maybe 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.
skullgiver@popplesburger.hilciferous.nl 2 weeks ago
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.
Sl00k@programming.dev 2 weeks ago
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.