About localizable interactions

[ImUrX]

I couldn't find the Q&A that mentioned some answers about this but I would like to discuss what solutions are being thought about currently.

Context

Now that message-based commands are going to be kind of killed (mentions still work) and developers are kind of being forced to migrate to slash commands (which I'm not against), there needs to be a viable solution before it becomes something that developers need to take care of themselves with the current API.

Requirements (IMO)

• I like the idea of that when uploading the interaction description you can upload a map of the translations seems simple and pretty good privacy-wise
  • This includes choices in options, there needs to be some kind of ID so it can be identified
• Add a way to generalize language for a guild so the bot can reply in a generalized way when replying with a non-ephemeral message
  • I think this may have some problems in some guilds but that's whats the discussion is for
• Add a way to get the user's language
  • This is maybe the difficult part privacy-wise, bots that grab this info can identify the user in a way but there needs to be a way for the bot to give an specialized message

[ghost]

for context, the Q&A transcript can be found here

[ImUrX]

Thanks, it seems there's no info on how they plan to add some kind of generalized language for guilds sadly

[Mehgugs]

There's some other stuff I think also needs addressing, for example discord does not do any unicode normalization across the api (from what I can tell). How will this work with types like choices etc?

[ImUrX]

This obviously needs each choice requiring an id and the id can be translated to multiple langs, I havent fully used v9 so I haven't fully used the API but i think its "kind" of included in the first requirement, I will edit it to include everything

[ImUrX]

And this would be a breaking change on the choice option ofc

[s5bug]

I have more complete thoughts on this elsewhere, but I dislike the idea of using the user's in-Discord locale for this. I use ja_JP in Discord because I'm already familiar with the English descriptions of most of the UI so it's nice for learning. I wouldn't want this to be en_US because I want a 24-hour clock, and Discord doesn't let me directly use en-US-u-hc-h23.

Unfortunately the solution I mention, contacting the bot itself, introduces (possibly way too much) latency between when the user types / and when they get results. I also believe that the bot itself shouldn't have any way to introspect what the user is currently typing.

I was brainstorming the parsing side of things for a while, and I was wondering if GrammaticalFramework could be leveraged in some way (it's literally built for this). Although I doubt Discord wants to force users to learn a parsing language for users who just want to keep things in en-US.

[ImUrX]

Honestly I see your point, I don't like that discord is forcing us to use something that feels it's missing some features that should have them.

I don't catch why wouldn't you like the bot to use the user's locale for interaction descriptions and etc, I understand that you are already familiar with the UI english and wanted to have it japanese to learn but it seems like an extreme case and it kinds of doesn't include that the idea of interactions is that they are part of the UI and not make them feel like something else, you could even fix this with a BD addon but that's already going too far away from what we were talking about xD.

I never heard about gf (thanks for talking about it), I really like to see solutions about i18 programmatically. It seems it's objective is to make a language less of a language and abstract it to some kind of grammar, honestly seems interesting, but I agree that there would be too many voices arguing against this lol.

The current easiest and simplest solution for an interaction's information to be translated is to add a map of translations for each part that requires a string imo currently

[RedDaedalus]

It's worth considering that there are other reasons not to want to see interaction responses in the app's locale – some translations could be bad, and someone may want to select a fallback for an incomplete localization.

[ImUrX]

obviously it should default to the languages that the bot support, and well if the translations are bad thats dependant of whoever uses the bot to report it or stop using it

[RedDaedalus]

An automatically selected default may not be the one the user actually wants.

[ImUrX]

the user is using discord in a certain language, thats his choice, i dont see why there would be a reason to be angry that the bot's description are in the same language to that. if you meant the default language if the user's one isnt supported, i think that should be the bot developer's choice

[Skillz4Killz]

Discord has an option for guild owners to provide a language. Until now it has been reserved for discovery usage, this should just be simply allowed for all servers to set and provided to bots as well on the interactions that are sent. guild_locale User specific locales are a bit extreme and privacy issues. If you are on a server for let's say Español users the chances are you also speak it and therefore the responses bot sends you should be understood as well. This entirely solves guild level command localization.

Global commands can have a separate solution whatever that may be like what was suggested above with registering a command with all translations as well.

[Mehgugs]

Here's my take on "interaction internationalization/localization".

There's a few things to consider here: localization of interations when they displayed in the client; bots being able to localize interaction responses as appropriate; and users being able to type in whatever language they want.

First I think I'd like to make an initial suggestion about how users should communicate what locale they wish to interact in with the bot.

I've seen a lot of comments here and on discord about how exposing the user's language setting would have issues with privacy and I'd like to also add that it is very inflexible. Bots have different use cases and users wanting to use different languages for different bots should be a given in my opinion.

If users could set a preferred language for integrations as a guild setting (as an option in the server context menu next to change nick name) then it would allow for some flexibility. If this value defaulted to the guild's language -- currently only used for discovery -- then it would also prevent the user's personal info being shared to bots. You could also extrapolate this for specific integrations, but I could see discord not wanting to store information per user per integration per guild.

Given this prefered language, discord could then localize command data when displayed to the user in the chat input. I think localizing components would be nice, but I can see discord wanting bots to do this since they are attached to messages. The user's prefered language could then be passed in interaction create payloads allowing bots to perform localization on their responses and send it back to the user prepared. This would address the first two issues I mentioned at the top.

What I described above is a nice idea, but if users cannot properly use the command UI then it's ultimately a wasted effort. Recently discord announced that they are upgrading the chat input editor and command input UI within it, however because discord never does normalization enumerated types like string choices can be brittle and clunky in some languages: even if you can type them correctly there's no guarantee the api will interpret it correctly. If discord did let us provide translations of commands or provide some other i18n format then we would still have these kinds of problems.

I think the biggest issue is that a lot of this is a regression compared to older message commands which bots managed themselves. A bot could accept a language setting from the user and then localized command discovery and execution could be done by the bot. I think a lot of people just want discord to let them handle this themselves providing translated command data to the api and dealing with it all manually but I think even in that scenario discord still needs to ensure it doesn't clash with the new UI for commands.