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  • Mar 11, 2026, 9:09 AM

    @antoinechambertloir The distinction you're drawing is a useful one, and I largely agree with it. When translation is imposed on you with no alternative, the responsibility for its faithfulness lies with whoever imposed it.

    But it makes me ask: which category does my situation fall into?

    I'm writing this reply in English. Not because I chose English as my preferred language of expression, but because if I wrote it in Korean, it would either be ignored or filtered through whatever tool my interlocutor happens to have on hand—and any resulting misreading would be treated as my problem. So I write in English, carefully, to preempt that. Is that a voluntary choice? Formally, yes. Practically, it sits much closer to the “imposed” end of your spectrum than it might appear.

    The contract model works cleanly when both parties have genuinely equivalent alternatives. When one party's only real options are “use this tool” or “don’t participate,” the contract framing starts to obscure more than it reveals.

    @Gargron

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Replies

  • Mar 11, 2026, 9:23 AM

    @hongminhee @Gargron on this network, I would find rude that you answer me in Korean as you would find rude that I answer you in French. But the software is connected with automatic translation system that may allow you to start some interaction, in a language or another, possibly falling out onto English. We both have this possibility, which allows us to share the responsability.
    (And if you didn't speak a single word out of Korean, and I didn't speak a word out of French, we wouldn't have much choice then, but trust that system!)

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  • Mar 11, 2026, 9:26 AM

    @hongminhee @Gargron Imagine we start following each other. Then you will see the posts I send in French, and I will see yours in Korean, as I see many on German or Spanish (although I speak German but not Spanish). In any case, some freedom emerges.

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  • Mar 11, 2026, 9:42 AM

    @antoinechambertloir I appreciate the spirit of what you're describing, and the fediverse's approach to translation is genuinely one of its nicer features.

    I'd just gently push back on one assumption: that the automatic translation available to both of us is roughly equivalent. French–English and Korean–English are not the same problem for these systems. The linguistic distance is much greater, the training data has historically been thinner, and the results have reflected that gap for a long time. It's only fairly recently that Korean–English machine translation has become reliable enough to carry a real conversation without significant loss.

    So when you write in French and I write in Korean, we're not quite sharing the responsibility equally—at least not yet. Though I do think we're getting closer, which is perhaps the most honest thing I can say about where I stand on all of this.

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