Gregory's ServerYeah, I've wondered about this exact thing myself
It seems like a bizarre design decision to push translation of a local page back out to the remote instance it originated from
Why not just do translation on the local end, where the post already exists?
It's baffling
I follow Mastodon on Github but I missed the discussion when LibreTranslate was adopted and really don't know exactly on *which* end it takes place as an absolute fact
I'm just inferring all this from what I've observed since LibreTranslate was adopted on my instance
Again (don't know if you saw it) one real strong clue is the full text of the Mastodon popup in Firefox is (503: remote data could not be fetched)
And yes, I have translated from Russian and Japanese (Kanji, I think it is) successfully
I mentioned LibreTranslate because that's how successful translations are tagged on my end
Now I don't know, which always drives me nuts until I find out :0
@FinchHaven
MOST LIKELY both DeepL and LibreTranslate implemented in Mastodon in the same way differing only in the "protocol" they use when communicating with translation service.
> it seem like a bizarre design decision
Not really. In most cases translation is not needed. So why would the origin node store unnecessary data? Even if it's "lazy" translation, it's not very useful to keep it there because most likely it won't be needed anymore. Also servers are often "regional". So most of the users speak the same language.
Furthermore server-to-server requests are not cheap, so adding another link to the chain (server1 -> server2 -> translation service) would not be optimal.
> from Russian and Japanese
Even stranger then.
@FinchHaven
MOST LIKELY both DeepL and LibreTranslate implemented in Mastodon in the same way differing only in the "protocol" they use when communicating with translation service.
> it seem like a bizarre design decision
Not really. In most cases translation is not needed. So why would the origin node store unnecessary data? Even if it's "lazy" translation, it's not very useful to keep it there because most likely it won't be needed anymore. Also servers are often "regional". So most of the users...