Given a Kanji compound word made of AB
+CD
, I think it's been pretty well established on the main site that questions of the form:
What does
ABCD
mean?
Are generally considered off-topic and constitute a pure translation question. My understanding is that quick translation questions of this form aren't allowed on the main site, but are perfectly fine on chat.
On the other hand, translation questions which have a form similar to:
I've seen
ABCD
in contextXYZ
. I've looked in dictionariesI
andJ
, but can't seem to figure out what it means. I can findAB
as meaning "reticulating splines", and the KanjiC
means "foo" andD
"bar", but I can't figure out what it means when it's all together.
I think are pretty established to be on-topic translation questions.
But what about translation questions with compound words made up of Kanji of the form:
I've seen
ABCD
in contextXYZ
. I can't find it in the dictionary, what does it mean?
I'm writing this question in reference to meaning of 名種設定?, but setting aside whether that particular question is too localized or not, is this form of translation question on-topic for the main site and what should be required of for Kanji compound word translation questions (I think particularly for ones which have 4+ Kanji?)
I guess the main concern is that I think the above form might tend to encourage one-line answers, but at the same time I think this one is a legitimate question and that others like it could be too, so I'm not sure how strict we should be either.
I think another option could be to allow these kinds of questions, and to edit the questions of the above form #3 into form #2 in places where it might benefit.
Some related questions on meta: