I comment text in both English and German. The (now semi-defunct) feddit.de instance has some/many/most communities that only allow German as language, while on other instances or in communities only English is allowed (or at least that’s the only way my comments get posted).

This creates the problem that I cannot really set a default language tag, because that would regularly delete my comments when the comment doesn’t get posted with no or the wrong language tag (because I forgot to add or change the tag.

I don’t know about programming, but I’m not sure how taxing this would be memory- or caching-wise.

  • Dieguito 🦝@feddit.itM
    4·
    1 month ago

    That is a super-interesting feature request! Thank you for the idea!

    Don’t worry for the implementation, I already have a similar mechanism to save the custom sort types you can apply to individual communities.

  • Dieguito 🦝@feddit.itMEnglish
    1·
    29 days ago

    On it, see this pull request 😉️ This will allow to set a “preferred language” for each community.

    If you are mostly commenting on an instance and want something more general, I advise setting a global value in the “Default language in editor” item in the Advanced settings screen.

    • 5714@lemmy.dbzer0.comOPEnglish
      2·
      29 days ago

      Wow that went fast, thank you!

      Interesting that the localisation of the languages are visible in the files. Some time ago I translated text for a game (Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead) and they had their text mostly in (IIRC binary) .po files. I’m not sure why they did that though.

      • Dieguito 🦝@feddit.itM
        2·
        28 days ago

        The PO format is the de-facto standard for software localization in open-source projects, it is a textual format (.po files are converted to binary .mo during the build process and linked against the executable) and it was originally designed for the GNU gettext internationalization library for the C language, but it has been ported to Python and other languages too over time as it grew popular. More info here.

        Mobile apps have always been widely incompatible with it, Android apps use XML resources, iOS apps use Localizable.strings (aka stringtables, similar to .properties files), Flutter apps use the .ARB format which is JSON-based.