Faster translation ideas...please share your thoughts

Frevel said: If you take priviledged and contributor translator who (lets call it) specializes on translating stuff:
Criteria: TLs > 300 and level above normal as well as few posts (below 20)
From about 15 or so not ONE has more than hand full of forum posts (and therefore don't appear in this thread). Like I said, they pretty much don't seem to care much and/or have the appropriate tools to circumvent some restrictions. And they probably don't watch the forum quite often (if at all).
Just wanted to prove my point with data :)

Maybe it's because I just woke up but I'm a bit confused as to what you're saying here. Is it a suggestion to automate the process?

Even it's "counterproductive" for me to say this but invitational system should never (even remotly) get automatic.

Well, because if so, yeah, this is the problem. For evey type of contribution short of coding useful new tools, there's an easy way to inflate the statistics. Each invite I do is a result of a full investigation into number and types of posts, number and types of translations, tag edits, behavior in comments and on the forums, neg/pos records, how recently they were active, etc. I've invited a few people who turned out to be mistakes and want to avoid that so far as I can in the future. So you can't really automate that.

Nevertheless I'm rather disappointed in the direction where this tread is going. It's now more like a discussion of new userlevels and privileges some have over other. We actually still *don't* have any practical solution to the main problem yet since I still see "? translation request 5125".

Honeslty I don't think there is a solution. There's a lot of stuff nobody really cares about so it'll never get translated. The only way would be to automatically remove translation_request from posts when they get to a certain age, but honestly I think that's a bad idea.

Frevel said:
...some only translate mournings (more for fun and learning hiragana perhaps)

I translate mournings. Being a messenger of sorrow is great fun. And I somehow learn hiragana along the way, too... magically. :)

0xCCBA696 said:
I translate mournings. Being a messenger of sorrow is great fun. And I somehow learn hiragana along the way, too... magically. :)

I only mentioned that because of the "automatic invites" issue. At least someone completes the stuff other (me included) left out on purpose :)

Just a quick question (before it ends up like the wiki desaster): Should I write a quick tutorial how to translate easy stuff? With all the stuff like hiragana/katakana recognition and using danbooru interface. Perhaps then a few more would join you in the neverending venture to translate all the short stuff :)

Frevel: "mourning" is the act of expressing grief, especially grief over someone's death. The word you want is probably "moaning".

Frevel said:
Should I write a quick tutorial how to translate easy stuff

This idea was proposed recently, but got quickly shot down.

How about a tutorial/guide on how to look up kanji when you don't know how to even read it? I could write that up if it would be useful.

I don't know if we want translations from people who don't even know how to look up kanji yet. And I actually don't mean that in a dickish way, because I'm not particularly good at it myself. But someone of that level wouldn't be able to make enough good sense of written Japanese, not good enough to translate. Besides, there are plenty of good resources for that on the web already for people who are so inclined to self-teach.

I am reminded of mass naked child events, and even electronic brain pancake crystal elderlies. Though it's probably difficult to do that badly knowing the kanji. Literally translating each kanji could be bad though.

(c.f. post #16355, post #239610)

I know senteces structure and verb tenses after a few semesters of taking classes, but I do have trouble at times reading kanji because either I can't remember them that well or it's rather complicated and I never learned it. But I suppose if someone really wants to find out what what the kanji is, they can use some resourcefulness to find out like I do :)

If you post a comment explaining your difficulties, someone will come to the rescue.

0xCCBA696 said:
Frevel: "mourning" is the act of expressing grief, especially grief over someone's death. The word you want is probably "moaning".

Damn, that was stupid of me. Sorry about that :)

LaC said:
This idea was proposed recently, but got quickly shot down.

You mean the wiki-article I wrote about the trivial stuff? I actually didn't mean to do that again. Rather just the opposite to get some more people to translate stuff.
But since the possibility of spamming bad translations is high I probably just leave it.

Just a short note for the people having a similar problem like this:

[...]but I do have trouble at times reading kanji because either I can't remember them that well or it's rather complicated and I never learned it.

Then you pretty much know how to write kanjis, right? Then it's no problem to translate most stuff.

1.) First look at the kanji and try to reproduce it on a paper.

2.) (Skip this, if you already installed Japanese language pack and IME on your PC) Then go to http://www.declan-software.com/japanese_ime/ and follow the instructions to get Japanese and IME installed.

3.) Change your language settings in the taskbar to Japanese and then press IME-Pad and then on "handwriting".

4.) In the window press clear to clear the presketched template and try to draw your kanji

5.) Hopefully you find the kanji you're looking for in the list right next to the pad. By pressing it you type it into a field (search/notepad, whatever).

6.) Use that function to search this kanji in google or go to sites like:
http://jisho.org/
or
http://www.popjisyo.com/WebHint/Portal_e.aspx (my favorite. You can even read the news in Japanese (with english "Furigana" if you want to call it that way)

Voila~, done. And because it's mostly a PITA to go through all these steps you will probably remember most of them for the next time :)

jxh2154 said:
The only way would be to automatically remove translation_request from posts when they get to a certain age, but honestly I think that's a bad idea.

Yes, please don't do that. It will basically ensure that even if someone who *is* interested in it joins danbooru after that happens, it still won't get translated. The problem behind translation_request being big (untranslated works) won't go away by just artificially lowering the number of images on the tag (thus making those images much harder to get translations for).

Solamarle said:
Yes, please don't do that. It will basically ensure that even if someone who *is* interested in it joins danbooru after that happens, it still won't get translated.

I completely agree. There are a lot of old pics which deserve a proper translation. Unfortunately *finding* them proves to be quite difficult. I will make my t_r searches more random now to try to find some of these gems :)

The problem behind translation_request being big (untranslated works) won't go away by just artificially lowering the number of images on the tag (thus making those images much harder to get translations for).

Right now the T_R kinda explode. After one translation ten other pop up. We have to somehow try to prioritize them but then again we have this issues already mentioned in page one :) .
Another idea: Let's get about 10 of nanasisan guys constantly tl-ing (http://danbooru.donmai.us/user/show/99605 >600 TL in four days o_o , they don't seem to bad either) and then we can *try* to lower the count :)

Just as a reminder; the translation requests link looks like it's still broken for non-privs. Should I file a ticket or something?

If the tag limit is a problem for translators, maybe one could ignore the translation_request tag when counting towards the search limit? It's of no use to non-translators, so it wouldn't increase the load much.

zatchii said:
Just as a reminder; the translation requests link looks like it's still broken for non-privs. Should I file a ticket or something?

Yes.

If engages an already translated "translation_request" post, just spend a few sec to change the tag. That could help a lot.
BTW, is there a "Partly_Translated" tag exist? I found some posts were actually translated but the job was not fully done.

partially_translated is what you're looking for.

evazion said:
partially_translated is what you're looking for.

Thank you very much>_<

I decided to bump this topic because I've created a pool, pool #509, which is called "Still Untranslated Stuff," pertaining to posts with the translation_request tag uploaded at least six months ago, but still are left untranslated. I've added the earliest posts with the translation_request tag, but with the number of posts with this tag (roughly 6,400), adding those left untranslated for at least six months will be a slow process (unless I get some help from you, like what happened with pool #282 or "Non-anime Danbooru Posts").

And I'm sure having them all translated and therefore be removed from this pool is slower.

What makes old translation requests any more interesting than new ones?

It's not like people just haven't gotten around to doing them - posts nobody thinks are interesting enough will probably keep the translation_request tag forever.

If translators are interested in finding requests that were made a long time ago, translation_request order:id is a fair approximation.

(Incidentally, why and how does the default order differ from order:id_asc?)