Not ideal yet for sure. But if autotranlate can't work by default, we will create the same closed communities we see on Twitter. Enabling a truly international conversation requires a good implementation of auto translate.
Discussion
Auto-translate is in practice very problematic. Twitter doesn't do it by default. Facebook I think does. But in both cases it is togglable in the UI next to each post. It would be great to have a toggle that way.
If Amethyst auto-translates without a toggle on every post I can't use this app. The assumptions you wrote above about the system and input language installed really don't work for a lot of people.
To clarify, does it auto-translate only for languages for which you downloaded the language models or does it do network queries?
Auto-translate on every note by default is a seriously bad idea.
Why is auto-translate a bad idea? (I’ve got no opinion just observing and curious)
Automatic translations has a great many problems
* You can't guess if they want it or not based on secondary system languages or input methods. Those being enabled is not the same thing as being able to understand the language.
* Automatic translation often can't correctly guess the source or destination language.
* Automatic translation relies upon the downloaded language models. Those are very limited that often doesn't do well with social media posts that is heavy with slang, regional dialects, or words that mean something only topically.
* Online network query translations can do a better job but you definitely don't want to do that for every note. Too many queries and a privacy nightmare. Facebook automatic translations are most often very bad but they at least have a better chance of getting things right because everything is on the server.
* You really need a toggle: given machine translations are often bad, if the UI lacks a toggle then the user can't switch back to the original then look up the words online to try to figure out what it really means.
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I'm completely failing at singular vs plural parallelism. Good luck with auto translation of that.
Thank you for the insights!
I understand your point. But I have now spent two days communicating with people of different languages all through automated translations on mine and their side. Even if the translation is not always good, it works. People can understand each other. It's fine.
That being said, i will add a option to select which languages to not translate to help people set up what they know and what they need help with.
But the default is to translate.
Thank you for the in app option. It's really problematic to rely on system languages.
Please add a toggle on each translated note to switch back to the original text? That's the minimum to bring the app back to usable. This is the most important point I need to make here.
That's already there. You can go back and forth between the languages
It downloads the model as needed. These are the supported languages. It autotranslates all of them.
https://developers.google.com/ml-kit/language/identification/langid-support
