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this post was submitted on 13 Jun 2023
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I don't think it's useless. It will enable automatic translation of posts and such, especially in multi-language communities. Say, a country or language specific community in which both native speakers and international users want to be able to participate in. There is likely points to be made for accessibility reasons as well, though I lack knowledge in that department. The feature just needs to be fleshed out properly.
First, manual selection. Soon, auto detection.
And this is just a guess but I imagine auto detection can still fail sometimes. Say you quote a portion of an article that's in a different language, or you include a code block with mostly English keywords while the rest of the post is in French or something.
Being able to manually select a language still makes sense to me.
I believe it's mostly just poor translation from microblogging world that doesn't have communities/groups per se. What really should be done in Lemmy is user setting of show/hide foreign language posts, defaulting to show. That would keep feeds/walls on other platforms that are part of fediverse working as intended while people that want forum-centric view and come to Lemmy happy.
Also I think you are gravely underestimating amount of non-English speaking people on internet.
Please pause and consider how the British Empire exported English all over the world, often by force, leading to its privileged status among languages today. Also consider that all people have different aptitudes for learning, and even a single individual will have vastly different abilities at different times in their life.
I’m only fluent in English, but that doesn’t make other languages invalid in any way. People who don’t speak English have just as much right to enjoy the internet as I do.
There are certainly ways Lemmy could handle languages better, and I hope to see improvements. But the tool should be what does the work, not the end-users.
I feel like that's kind of biased coming from someone who (presumably at least) natively speaks a language that is very closely related to English. You might tell me that they're still relatively different, and you wouldn't be completely wrong about that, but there are languages that are much more different from English than German. There isn't such a thing as objective difficulty of a language, it's all relative. English certainly isn't easy for everyone.
How is it promoting monolingualism and apparently Alzheimer's to want to have non-English spaces on the internet.