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洪 民憙 (Hong Minhee) @hongminhee@hackers.pub
Public

I've been wrestling with implementing content support in Hackers' Pub, our -powered platform for software engineers.

While ActivityPub theoretically supports multilingual content through the contentMap property, the reality is that most server implementations (Mastodon, Misskey, etc.) don't properly handle this content as of April 2025. This creates a significant challenge for us.

We want our users to share their knowledge in multiple languages, but we need to ensure compatibility with existing ActivityPub servers. I'm considering several approaches:

  1. Creating separate posts for each language with clear language indicators, linking them through inReplyTo relationships (so translations appear as replies to the original post)
  2. Using the primary language in content while storing translations in contentMap
  3. Adding "View in other languages" links at the bottom of each post
  4. Implementing inline language dividers that degrade gracefully on non-supporting servers, for example:
    <div lang="en">
  <h3>English</h3>
  <p>This is the English content…</p>
</div>
<hr>
<div lang="ko">
  <h3>한국어</h3>
  <p>한국어 내용입니다…</p>
</div>

I'm leaning toward a hybrid approach—showing content in the user's preferred language when possible while providing easy access to other language versions.

Has anyone tackled this problem effectively? I'd love to hear about your experiences or ideas for making multilingual content work well in the fediverse, especially when dealing with server implementations that don't fully support ActivityPub's multilingual features.

Hackers' Pub

Hackers' Pub is a place for software engineers to share their knowledge and experience with each other. It's also an ActivityPub-enabled social network, so you can follow your favorite hackers in the fediverse and get their latest posts in your feed.

hackers.pub

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Renne Rocha @rennerocha@chaos.social
Public

New blog post: Things I learned from translating free software projects

rennerocha.com/posts/things-i-

Sharing some things that I learned when I decided to translate two projects (@gancio and @pretix) into Brazilian Portuguese.

Things I learned from translating free software projects | Renne Rocha

Sharing what I learn about software development mainly

rennerocha.com · Sharing what I learn about software development mainly

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GunChleoc @gunchleoc@mastodon.scot
Public

To speakers of underrepresented languages: If your language isn't available in Mastodon's posting window and you'd like me to add it, please let me know.

I will need:

1. Locale code en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ 2-letter ISO 639-1 codes are preferred, and if not available, we can use a 639-3 code instead
2. English name
3. Native name

If your language is small, try not to be too granular re. dialect so that you will get more posts when filtering.

Boosts welcome.

List of ISO 639 language codes - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

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Browser-Native Translation and Language Detection APIs Coming Soon

洪 民憙 (Hong Minhee) @hongminhee@hackers.pub

Just reviewed the W3C draft for the Translator and Language Detector APIs. This is genuinely exciting development for web developers.

The proposal would add native browser support for:

  • Text translation between languages
  • Language detection of arbitrary text
  • Both with streaming capabilities

No more relying on third-party translation services or embedding external APIs for basic language operations. All processing happens locally in the browser.

The API design is clean and straightforward:

// Translation example
const translator = await Translator.create({
  sourceLanguage: "en",
  targetLanguage: "fr"
});

const translatedText = await translator.translate("Hello world");

// Language detection example
const detector = await LanguageDetector.create();
const results = await detector.detect("Hello world");
// Returns array of detected languages with confidence scores

This will be a game-changer for multilingual sites and applications. The browser handles downloading appropriate language models and manages usage quotas.

The spec is still in draft form but shows promising progress toward standardizing these capabilities across browsers. Looking forward to seeing this implemented.

Read more →
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Nemo_bis 🌈 @nemobis@mamot.fr
Public

Re-: recurring topics here.

.net

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