I often reply under Japanese posts, and I always assume users will use a translator as I do, but maybe in the context of a Japanese instance or conversation this may look rude?
I often reply under Japanese posts, and I always assume users will use a translator as I do, but maybe in the context of a Japanese instance or conversation this may look rude?
Can’t speak for others (obviously, as this is about individual etiquette perceptions) but I would consider it to be polite to only enter conversations with unknown parties in languages that the parties have shown to be capable of speaking and understanding.
Using a new language entering a conversation would therefore signal either familiarity (“I know they understand me”) or rudeness (“I don’t care if they understand me”) to me, I suppose.
nah, it’s better for information integrity to reply in the language you understand imo, comments translated using translator services are very obvious anyway and some people are multilingual
I wonder, then, if the move is to type your comment, run it through a translator yourself, then post both? I saw that move a lot on Rednote before it added its own translator.
ActivityPub has a feature where most post objects can actually have different language representations within one item. On a protocol level, MissKey/Mastodon/Lemmy can have the same message in different languages, and the client can pick the one to display. Unfortunately, I’ve never seen anyone make use of it. Seems like a waste. If used, users with their display language set to German/Japanese will see the “machine translated:” post first, and people with English as a language will see the original. English first, and good implementations would allow the user to switch languages to compare.