It also wants to remind you that coins are going away.
  • Lvxferre@lemmy.ml
    12·
    1 year ago

    Cute idea, Reddit Inc., but ultimately flawed. You’re simply showing that you don’t understand your own users and how they use your platform.

    Comments and text posts do play a huge role in Reddit, and those will probably get translated. However the topic is more often than not introduced by an image or a link. Text in the images will not get translated, and for the link you’d need to rely on a second machine translator.

    Furthermore a lot of the comments require further context, that won’t become “magically” available just because you translated it. I’ll give you guys some examples:

    • “Is it him or is it not? Of course it’s him! The showgirls!”
    • “I’ll give you an gold award that is worth more than money! A-hai, hi-hi!”

    If you read those and thought “what the fuck? I don’t… I don’t even…” - exactly. You might get them if you speak Italian (first one) or Portuguese (second one), but then you don’t need the translation at all.

    And you’ll likely not need the translations from English to another language, given that ~half of the Reddit userbase are native English speakers, and the other half is heavily biased towards people who know English as L2+.

    • cerement@slrpnk.net
      8·
      1 year ago

      there was an old urban legend / joke on machine translation

      during the cold war, Americans were trying to use computers to translate Russian messages, they finally got a working program they thought was pretty good, fed it the message “Out of sight, out of mind.” and had it translated to Russian then back to English, the final result was “Invisible, insane.”

      • Lvxferre@lemmy.ml
        5·
        1 year ago

        There’s this, too - machine translation is often awful, even if you get the context.

    • glad_cat@lemmy.sdf.org
      2·
      1 year ago

      Yep. One more proof that they don’t understand what users want.

      I’m glad Lemmy is here to fill that need.

  • bl4kers@lemmy.mlEnglish
    5·
    1 year ago

    Automated translations are inherently flawed. It would have been better to open up community translation submissions

  • AutoTL;DR@lemmings.worldBEnglish
    3·
    1 year ago

    This is the best summary I could come up with:

    To start, posts can be translated into English, Spanish, German, French, Portuguese, Italian, Dutch, and Swedish.

    Full translation of posts and comments seems to be Reddit’s plan, though, as the admin writes that “soon, your entire conversation experience on Reddit can be multilingual!”

    The admin’s post also reminds users that Reddit is about to deprecate its previous coins system, meaning you soon won’t be able to thank a stranger for giving you gold.

    The last day coins will work is Tuesday, September 12th, and according to the admin, Reddit has already deprecated the ability to give awards on the Old Reddit design and on the “mobile desktop experience” (which I am guessing means mobile web).

    Reddit has promised that there will be some kind of awards system down the line but hasn’t yet shared details.

    Android Authority found evidence in Reddit’s Android app that the new system may let users turn gold or Reddit karma into real money, which doesn’t sound like a great replacement.

    The original article contains 327 words, the summary contains 165 words. Saved 50%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!