New Pool Idea: Translation Request - LUNATIC Mode

This is for those posts where the text is so small, or the handwriting is so bad, that you stare endlessly at the screen from close-up until you develop a headache and you finally throw up your hands in frustration. This is especially more prominent with the Japanese language and their 1000's of ideographs.

I figure this can at least let those that want a translation know that a translator gave it a look but decided it was too difficult. It can also let those that like a challenge give it a look to see if they can crack the translation.

What do others think about this? Also, should it be a pool or a tag, and what should the name be. My idea is in the topic title.

pool #9407 has a lot of examples.

For a tag, I think something like absurdly_small_text or very_small_text captures the exact problem descriptively so that translators could focus on them more tightly. Having a tag for unreadable_text as well would capture other situations.

As for a pool, having an Eye-Ruiner pool could work as you said for both the unreadable text and small text, and just as well as for extreme walls of text, strange fonts and some kinds of Engrish. Such a pool could have a disclaimer that such works are not expected to be translated and to attempt it only if you're experienced.

It's not something I've thought about; but it seems very useful. A pool would be more definite: tags get lost in the flow. Who scans every post's tags for a category ?

I changed my idea for a pool title from "Eye-Ruiner" to "Translation Difficulty - Nightmare Mode". It's a bit more clear, plus it's catchy enough to help people remember.

Going by the feedback so far, it sounds more and more like a pool would be the best option. It's less likely to get lost in the weeds when someone is scanning over a post, plus it allows multiple types of translation difficulties to be put under the same umbrella.

I'll let this sit for a day to see if anyone else has any ideas...

BrokenEagle98 said:

I changed my idea for a pool title from "Eye-Ruiner" to "Translation Difficulty - Nightmare Mode". It's a bit more clear, plus it's catchy enough to help people remember.

Going by the feedback so far, it sounds more and more like a pool would be the best option. It's less likely to get lost in the weeds when someone is scanning over a post, plus it allows multiple types of translation difficulties to be put under the same umbrella.

I'll let this sit for a day to see if anyone else has any ideas...

"LUNATIC Mode".

I also second the introduction of absurdly_small_text to complement the existing wall_of_text tag.

That said, the difficulty of doing a translation can be somewhat subjective. Tiny kanji are usually not an issue for native Chinese speakers, for example.

What I usually think of as hard to translate are things like puns (especially if it's both verbal AND visual), heavy dialects, classical/archaic languages, poetry and songs (since you have to adapt the meter and rhythm to some extent), and the like.

Sometimes you'll also encounter long complicated twenty-clause pileup sentences (a mild exaggeration), which works quite well (and may even be masterpieces of prose) in the source language but becomes incredibly awkward once you translate it into English. yua_(checkmate) occasionally delves into that, to give an example. Usually I have to chop up the sentence into smaller manageable pieces and abuse em dashes to work around that.

You'll note that in the above cases the hard part isn't about understanding the meaning of the passage, but in trying to convey as much meaning as possible while retaining the original sense or aesthetics (that is, the experience or effect the text has on readers of the source language, beyond the literal meaning of the words themselves) of the passage.

Fluent and natural-sounding translations are also part of the sense/aesthetics package (because the passage sounds natural and fluent to readers of the original passage, so it SHOULD have the same effect on readers of the translated text as well), barring deliberate typos or broken grammar on the part of the original author.

Hm. What happens when someone crazy enough tackles the wall of text or makes enough effort to recognize tiny text and translate it properly? Would that post get removed from the pool?

NNescio said:

"LUNATIC Mode".

Great name... SOLD! :->

As for the other stuff you said, that's another reason why it would be better as a pool, due to the subjectivity of the translation difficulty. I hadn't thought of puns and other difficult language aspects to translate, but it could definitely be part of the qualifications for adding to the pool.

So, thus far, we have:

Visual difficulty

• Absurdly small text
• Bad handwriting
• Walls of text partially obscured by foreground objects

Language difficulty

• Puns
• Heavy Dialects
• Classical/Archaic languages
• Poetry
• Songs

I think it would be a good idea when adding an image to the pool to make a comment on which of the above is the reason it is being added, and what parts of the image to find it in.

Type-kun said:

Hm. What happens when someone crazy enough tackles the wall of text or makes enough effort to recognize tiny text and translate it properly? Would that post get removed from the pool?

That would be the idea, although by no means would the pool be like the translation_request tag, as there is no expectation that the posts in the pool will get translated.

I just created pool #11363. Take a look and see if anything's missing. After a day, I'll start populating it.

Thank you.

Gonna change the title from Translation Difficulty to Translation Request. Putting difficulty and then lunatic mode right after sounds redundant and changing it to Translation Request puts it in line with the original tag like with the Extreme Engrish pool.

Sounds good to me... :)

Question: Can be added qualifier for pool about possible requirement for (academic) knowledge in specific area?
For example fresh anatomical stuff with GuP

I'm asking this because I doubt that most translators have advanced tech or medical education. (no harm intended)

I was initially leaning towards yes, but as I thought about it more, I realized that the difficulty here lies mostly with word translation and not with sentence structure or flow. Most technical and medical words should have a one-to-one translation, and there are resources on the internet that have expanded dictionaries that include those kinds of words.

I'd be interested to hear what other translators have to say on the subject though...

I felt like this pool is something that only translators should add to themselves since they're the ones that can truly gauge how difficult a translation is.

tapnek said:

I felt like this pool is something that only translators should add to themselves since they're the ones that can truly gauge how difficult a translation is.

+1 to this.
Otherwise this could just flood this pool with a lot of tl;dr postings but would be pretty simple to translate in English.