12h ago

Proposal: Allow contributions in all European languages if they are labelled accordingly in the title.

Many suggestions on how to replace American products have a very local home in an EU country and are not available without problems or costs in other EU countries or the UK.
Why not also allow local tips in the local language? Europe is not a monophyletic block, but thrives on the diversity of cultures. Our communication here in the community can also express this.

18 comments

In another context I thought about the possibility for links in foreign languages as long as they are marked, and maybe summarized by a sentence to help people get the context. I think in todays time with browser being able to translate, that should be a feasible approach. I didn't find time to debate that with the other mods, yet.
To me, coming from a moderation perspective, the idea of whole discussions in a plentitude of languages is problematic. In my opinion, we would need to have more mods being able to at least police content if need be.
- Please remember non browser people as well.
  For my browse behavior pattern it would be basically removing the community if it's more non English then English (or my native tongue but I'd vote against allowing it for the same reason).
  I screen the titles for things where I feel I can contribute or benefit from in Voyager.
  Think of the classic room scrolling.
  Engaging with foreign languages means spending either one second deciding to ignore it or like 15 seconds to copy pasted it into a translator, switching tools in between.
  I'm realistic enough to know that I wouldn't do that, especially if it's an outlier post in s plethora of English ones.
- Allowing link to websites in any language, accompanied by a quick explanation in english, seems like a good option IMO. (And I say this as a non-native english speaker)
- Level. Allow German, French and Spanish. You should be able to get mods that speak at least one of those languages. And I'm saying this as someone who speaks none of those. But I think it would be good if English didn't have such a dominance. Might even motivate people to learn one.
  
  Well. The point is, that this approach could be a disfavor for all the eastern European countries, which users may also discuss in their native languages.
  Also the server rules state, that they are in for German/English communities.
  
  Adding Italian. Our northern neighbors probably have fewer problems with English than their southern neighbors.
- LLM are able to do pretty good translations nowadays, even where former automatic translators did badly (example: Japanese to English sucks on Ggle Translate, but is much better on LLM). So I think it's manageable for occasional moderation. You can use DuckDuckGo's duck.ai for a free and safer access to different LLMs. I don't know what's the quality for languages with a smaller amount of content on the internet, though.
  
  Well, are you ready to moderate non-English post?

In theory it sounds good, in practice I think it might not work so well. The problem with moderation was already mentioned. How do you stop people from posting shit in other languages, especially smaller ones that most moderators won't know? Sure, they can use translation tools, but those aren't perfect. I see the danger of either moderating too much (mistranslated posts) or too little.
On another note, using a common language also has a unifying aspect. Even if I can't buy a local French product in a store in Germany, it's still cool to read about it. Maybe it'll even spark a discussion about similar products in other EU countries. Either way, sharing progress like "We have a locally produced alternative for this chocolate bar now in Finland" is uplifting news for others, too.
Anyway, I get where you're coming from but I see more advantages sticking to English as a common language.
- Yeah, it's all fun and games until someone starts speaking Basque.
  
  The most European language of all. (Totally serious here – it's the language spoken for the longest time here. All other are later immigrants.)

Ok, it seems to be difficult to bring all the languages under one roof (and to moderate them). The alternative seems to be to set up a separate community for each language and move them together. One community in feddit.it, one in feddit.fr and so on.
- !utilisereuropeen@jlai.lu

18 comments