absofuckinlutely DETEST autotranslation & localization.
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FYI:
multilinguism ≠ plurilinguism
@MastodonEngineering should be really proud of themselves because we have here the closest thing to a plurilingual platform.
multilingual platforms allow you to write in the language of your choice, usually with the app completely translated into the language of your choosing.
on plurilingual platforms, you can write in whatever language you choose and regardless of localization.
that’s Mastodon today.
@blogdiva @MastodonEngineering Oh my god you're right! I routinely auto-translate posts into English and then confidently respond in English knowing they can auto-translate back to their own language. I know the translation will be choppy, but it's literally *good enough* for chatting on the internet.
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it was absolute hell when i was writing academic papers, 30 years ago, quoting sources in 2-3 different languages.
in proper academic writing, if you translate the text, you include the original in a footnote or vice-versa.
Microsoft Office, with their insistence that autocorrect can only happen one language at a time, has kneecapped plurilingual literacy.
we could be using language anchors to deal with dictionary switching, but nooo because illiterate techbros rule the world.
@blogdiva I never understood why language anchors weren’t just a thing in Unicode from the start! It would have actually made Han unification make some sense.
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@blogdiva @MastodonEngineering Oh my god you're right! I routinely auto-translate posts into English and then confidently respond in English knowing they can auto-translate back to their own language. I know the translation will be choppy, but it's literally *good enough* for chatting on the internet.
@blogdiva @MastodonEngineering Thank you so much for the concept of the "pluralinguistic"! That's going to be very useful.
Because I've experienced what you're talking about: a system that detects when I'm writing English vs. writing (poorly in my case) in French. It drove me up the wall that either the English or the French were always both underlined in red *and* that the spellcheck didn't apply (ie, it would be great if it added accent marks for me).
We need pluralinguistic applications.
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it was absolute hell when i was writing academic papers, 30 years ago, quoting sources in 2-3 different languages.
in proper academic writing, if you translate the text, you include the original in a footnote or vice-versa.
Microsoft Office, with their insistence that autocorrect can only happen one language at a time, has kneecapped plurilingual literacy.
we could be using language anchors to deal with dictionary switching, but nooo because illiterate techbros rule the world.
@blogdiva Libre Office does much better for plurilingual text
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it was absolute hell when i was writing academic papers, 30 years ago, quoting sources in 2-3 different languages.
in proper academic writing, if you translate the text, you include the original in a footnote or vice-versa.
Microsoft Office, with their insistence that autocorrect can only happen one language at a time, has kneecapped plurilingual literacy.
we could be using language anchors to deal with dictionary switching, but nooo because illiterate techbros rule the world.
@blogdiva I've never been happier then the day I realised thunderbird would spell check multiple languages at once for emails. But apart from that lovely exception, silicon valley dominance in tech means all apps assume people only use one language. It's such a limited small minded way of thinking...
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it was absolute hell when i was writing academic papers, 30 years ago, quoting sources in 2-3 different languages.
in proper academic writing, if you translate the text, you include the original in a footnote or vice-versa.
Microsoft Office, with their insistence that autocorrect can only happen one language at a time, has kneecapped plurilingual literacy.
we could be using language anchors to deal with dictionary switching, but nooo because illiterate techbros rule the world.
@blogdiva I sort of see that - some aspects of typesetting depend on the language, but this should have been a problem of the journal, no? I did not have to quote many non-English texts in papers, it usually worked. Turning off all auto correct stuff could have helped with that (if I had used Word...)
But I totally agree: our lives are so much richer when we use more languages. My best experience was four person around a table speaking four languages (because we had no single common language)
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it was absolute hell when i was writing academic papers, 30 years ago, quoting sources in 2-3 different languages.
in proper academic writing, if you translate the text, you include the original in a footnote or vice-versa.
Microsoft Office, with their insistence that autocorrect can only happen one language at a time, has kneecapped plurilingual literacy.
we could be using language anchors to deal with dictionary switching, but nooo because illiterate techbros rule the world.
@blogdiva see also google surveilling everything i do but comletely failing to realize, on my phone with german as the system language, that i'm usually looking for the english wikipedia page
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it was absolute hell when i was writing academic papers, 30 years ago, quoting sources in 2-3 different languages.
in proper academic writing, if you translate the text, you include the original in a footnote or vice-versa.
Microsoft Office, with their insistence that autocorrect can only happen one language at a time, has kneecapped plurilingual literacy.
we could be using language anchors to deal with dictionary switching, but nooo because illiterate techbros rule the world.
@blogdiva switch to LaTeX for academic writing, and other software for writing short works. Forget about Word
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RE: https://mastodon.social/@firefoxwebdevs/115849251057488746
absofuckinlutely DETEST autotranslation & localization. this is why i use VPNs: to search the web beyond gringolandia; to read the web in other languages & not gringlish.
if you want to know how pigheaded a business "culture" is, look at how they force localization ―and this includes search engines.
then there’s the damage done to plurilinguism by Microsoft Office.
i hate the illiterate techbro, one language at a time, model of reading & writing.
develop for plurilinguism or GTFO
@blogdiva My current solution for "auto-translate" is basically an automatic dictionary app that "translates" the word I'm currently hovering over. (And the dictionary is human-maintained and conveys nuance and subtle stuff better than a robot translator ever could) I have a rudimentary understanding of Japanese grammar, but my reading vocabulary is currently shit, so the dictionary is necessary (I haven't even reached the "self reinforcing" point of learning the writing system well enough to "read" unknown characters... It's a hell of a lot harder than purely phonetic-alphabet languages)
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@blogdiva switch to LaTeX for academic writing, and other software for writing short works. Forget about Word
Not a bad suggestion, for those in a position to take it - which is by no means everyone.
Presumably via \usepackage{babel} and whatever other tweaks one may add for fonts and such.
Here's the frightening manual which no one will want to see:
https://mirrors.mit.edu/CTAN/macros/latex/required/babel/base/babel.pdfBut it does indicate that a certain amount of thought has gone into it.
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J Jürgen Hubert shared this topic
