Putting more work on the admin running the server, that’s a great solution for someone who doesn’t have to do the extra work.

That's a fallacy known as "moving the goalposts", given that the original claim was about impossibility. I'll bite though.

Yes, there is an additional amount of overhead. However, I genuinely do not think that it is a lot, provided that the admins are smart. Automatic translation is built in browsers nowadays, and again, context.

I'll give you an example. Someone posts a picture of a cat doing something silly, then text in a language that you don't speak. Do you even need to bother translating it to know if it's OK? ...not really, right? You can simply wait until there's any sort of report against it.

And going through this amount of overhead yields a more diverse and active community. The whole point of building a community - be it an instance, a /c/, or even a non-Lemmy forum - is to service people with an online space to hang around.

Another thing that you guys are failing to consider is that the ability of the admins to recruit help scales up alongside the size of the community. Most content will be probably fine; rule-breaking content ends getting reported, unless the community itself is composed of nothing but troublemakers. The later is however blatantly obvious even if you don't speak the language.

Why I'm insisting on this point: people in Lemmy really, really love to babble about minorities and their empowerment. But when it comes to practical actions towards the empowerment of minorities, suddenly it's "too hard"?

This sort of "use this language else fuck off" approach might not be too problematic for something like a Spanish or a Mandarin speaker; sure, they'll eventually find some instance in their language. The picture however changes when you get someone who speaks Basque or Min or another minority language - because that instance won't exist.

I think that the function of translating posts and messages, as in Mastodon, would facilitate the moderation of foreign communities.