Should pure translation questions be allowed?

Question

I saw this discussion on chat and I figured we should have it in meta. Should translation questions be allowed, and if so, what kinds? For example:

• "Plz translate my homework/these song lyrics/this Ruby documentation"
• "What does this word mean in this context?"
• "What does this obscure phrase that's not in any dictionaries mean?"
• "Is there a similar idiom to this one in English?"
• "How do I say this in Japanese?"
• ...

A site dedicated to Japanese language questions that doesn't allow any translation questions seems doomed to an early death--but so does one that fills up with homework questions. So where are we drawing the line?

Possible rules of thumb:

• Will this answer be useful in more than one context?
• Is it the kind of question you could ask a friend or language partner?

Answer 1

I think this is something that would need to be taken on a case by case basis, but my general thought is that more obscure things or subtle translation issues should be allowed, but bulk "translate this" questions should not be allowed. For example:

"Plz translate my homework/these song lyrics/this Ruby documentation"

Inappropriate for the site as it is a bulk translation request that and it seems like someone is just trying to get a free translation service.

"What does this word mean in this context?"

Allowed as this is a question more about the subtleties of the Japanese as opposed just a translation request.

"What does this obscure phrase that's not in any dictionaries mean?"

Allowed, assuming that the asker did a degree of due diligence (i.e. "I checked, x, y, and z dictionaries and couldn't find it.") prior to asking the question.

"Is there a similar idiom to this one in English?"

Allowed as it is more about the subtleties and cultural differences than the actual translation.

"How do I say this in Japanese?"

Generally not allowed unless it is an extremely complex word that someone is asking about in which case it might fall under the "obscure phrases" clause, but the wording might have to be different, i.e. asking if there is an equivalent to a phrase in Japanese as opposed to how to translate something.

Answer 2

I would suggest that you do not provide rudimentary "Can you translate this?" services on this site. This is not a translation service; There are better tools for that job.

Translations will be a natural part of this site, but only as long at they they involve questions about the "finer points of the language."

There are difficult-to-translate phrases and certain idioms that do not "translate well" across language barriers. I fully support translation requests of this nature. But I would highly suggest that you do not accept question in the form:

Can you translate this for me?

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Nunc eros dui, mattis a mattis in, consequat non nisl. Nam condimentum, orci in ornare dapibus, ipsum diam ultrices odio, sit amet volutpat justo odio vel magna.

Blah, blah, blah...

Questions of "General Reference" should be closed. There are real people behind this site answering questions, and this site has to remain interesting to them — or they'll go elsewhere. Once the site devolves into "How do you say 'dog' in Japanese?", you've lost your core audience.

Answer 3

How about waiting to see what kind of translation questions come in so we can identify the trends and then decide where the line ought to be drawn?

Answer 4

I want to add that one cannot judge if something is a translation purely by how it is asked. Simple example:

"How do I translate 義理?"

While this looks like just a translation request, in the end, it's not a word that can be translated, and one needs quite a bit of knowledge to understand the nuances. You can't just write "honour" and be done with it, as that is decidedly incorrect.

Answer 5

I think if the poster has made a clear effort to look up the translation himself (and posts his findings), that should be allowed. It's very hard to understand the difference between words that are translated by the same English term but are used completely differently.

Answer 6

I think we should only allow translation question if and only if the translation in question is particularly difficult to translate such that there is an academic merit in answering the question that would be extremely helpful to those who are learning Japanese, or that a non-trivial solution exist for the question.

For example, if the question was something like

How do you say よろしくお願いします in English.

This kind of translation question would have non-trivial answers.

If the question was something like

How do you say 宿題 in English.

We should avoid allowing these kind of questions simply because it's a question that can be answered with a dictionary lookup, hence trivial answers exist.

Answer 7

I agree with you that we need to draw the line at some point. Though i think the rules of thumb you put forward about asking friends is hard to judge cause everyone has a different set of friends (i.e. all Japanese, or no Japanese speaking friends)

How about, translating parts of sentences is ok, but i would be against translating complete sentences since that would almost always be homework based.

But then you get the problem of "what is duck in Japanese" questions which we want to prevent because it is more of a easily answer question one can look up easily. However "how do Japanese distinguish between pigeons and doves" would be an ok question.

Maybe listing out some examples might be good. Are there any particular translation questions that have been asked that you feel shouldn't be here?

Answer 8

I will throw out something more controversial: Stupid questions are fine. Why? Because first off, they will not get upmodded, and be trivially easy to answer, not wasting anyone's time reading through them. Stackoverflow has a fair share of trivial questions, and they just disappear after a few minutes into the "answered" heap, and nobody bothers reading them. Since the search algorithms are decent enough, you never see them again either, or if you do, they are usually really helpful but hard to find ("Where does X store my config files?").

If someone makes the effort of actually registering / logging in, then typing out a few sentences with his question, he has spent multiple minutes. Any sane person would not do that without trying google translate first. Put a google translate link visibly on the "ask a question" page.

Anything that goes through the implicit Filter Of Laziness is probably acceptable to begin with. Adding a elitist layer on top of that only results in a specialized page that only 126 people [that's the current rep200+ count as of this writing] use.

"You have to draw the line at some point". The line draws itself. People are too lazy to type questions which google translate can answer.

Answer 9

I think asking simple translation questions about documentation should be allowed.

The reason I say this is because even for fairly advanced students it is possible they will run into something problematic and these will often have impact on that persons profession.

While I am not saying the community should take the place of a professional translator and translate a book for them, I think it is reasonable to allow people to ask the meaning of up to say a paragraph of text.