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 Please, from now on use #MacroslopOffice beiing the correct name.
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 really good point! I'm writing an article on directions for Mastodon including a section on leveraging strengths, is it okay if I quote you on this and link to this thread? Something along the lines of
"As your anutifa liza points out, Mastodon today is the closest thing there to a plurilingual platform, where you can write in whatever language you want."
@blogdiva ah, thanks for explaining the distinction!
Over the past couple of years, I’ve seen more and more websites in German that are just auto-translated from English. And boy does it ever show…
@slothrop yeah i actually switched my browser's language from German to English last year to get rid of all the auto-translated "German". Unfortunately there are sites that apparently select the language by IP geolocation (was zum Fick, weil es in jeder Region nur eine Sprache gibt oder wie?), but it has reduced the amount of slop I get by default.
@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.
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 ;)
@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
@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)
@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...
@blogdiva Libre Office does much better for plurilingual text
@HighlandLawyer @blogdiva on the Fediverse, the plurilinguistic feature I would love is the possibility to write a post in multiple language not by mixing text (violating the language indication), but as multiple versions of the same post, all packed together in a single object.
@oblomov @HighlandLawyer @blogdiva heh, I built that... Still a work in progress, but it's available at https://codeberg.org/whythawk/hop-sauna... I call this "dynamic internationalisation" because it's something you control directly.
@GavinChait @HighlandLawyer @blogdiva interesting, thanks. I'm particularly curious about the UX for it, and how these things render on other platforms.
@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.
btw: when Bush & Cheney were getting ready to invade #Iraq, i started translating news from EU & Latin America that were not being reprinted or followed up by USA media.
BBC, El Pais, they would block americans from their sites. L’Express never did; neither news sites from Canada, México, Brasil. so i was a one-woman RSS feed, circumventing geoblocks, quote posting (yes, they existed before twitter) what caught my eye or blogging full translations.
USA media has never been trustworthy.
