Translating a post or a message

Posts arrive here from servers all over the Fediverse, in every language there is. Where a post has writing in it, its action bar carries a translate button - press it and the body is replaced by a translation, with the button turning into one that gives you the original back.

Translation happens on this server, not at an outside service, and a post's translation is kept so the next person to ask for the same one gets it straight away.

Messages you have been sent carry the same button. Two things are deliberately different there. Your own messages never have one - the point is reading what arrived, not what you wrote - and nothing is translated until you ask, so a conversation is never quietly sent through a translator.

Translating a message does hand its text to this server, which is worth knowing if you use encrypted messages: an encrypted message is one this server cannot read, and translating it is you choosing to let it. Nothing is written down - the translation is not saved and the message itself is unchanged - but it has been read here, so it is not end-to-end encrypted the way an untranslated message is. You are told this once, before the first message you translate.

The button only appears where the server has a translator installed, so on some sites you will not see it at all.