Danbooru

On the use of the hard_translated tag

Posted under General

The wiki entries for hard_translated and translated state that posts with English text should be tagged hard_translated, even when the post is originally in English and hasn't been translated at all.

I don't know how this idea came about, but it's really dumb. It's misleading and simply wrong to tag a post originally done in English as hard_translated. As an example, consider post #500615 and post #500587. The English one is the original, and the Japanese one is a hard translation apparently done by some guy on Pixiv. If we were to follow current policy then the English version would be tagged hard_translated, incorrectly implying that it is an edit of the Japanese version.

I think that posts that were originally written in English should be tagged english. Hard_translated should be reserved for posts that have actually had a translation edited in.

Updated by jxh2154

I simultaneously agree and disagree with the policy as it stands for various reasons but this may just be 6am speaking.

Translated, as it stands, is more like "english typeset" but that sounds dumb as a tag. This is, after all, primarily an english-speaking site, we don't really want or need non-english hard translated images (some of us would argue we don't want hard-translated images at all but that's an issue for another day.)

Aren't the current definitions more in line with the general "tag based on what's in the image, not outside knowledge" tagging policy? (Though of course there are other tags that run counter to that.) I would expect most comics in English on here to be hard translations, so in general its definition works.

You (ignoring multilingual) want comics you can understand and save without relying on Danbooru's tl notes, you search for hard_translated. Yes, there are some exceptions, but the current usage ("all in English, part of the image itself") is useful. Remove the translation tags from posts that were originally in English and you lose that. And have to mention in every such post that it isn't a hard translation.

But there's no way for you to know that that's the original unless you're really familiar with the source, so you're going to end up with the tag inconsistently removed anyway.

evazion said:
I think that posts that were originally written in English should be tagged english.

English has a different usage; it isn't necessarily "fully readable English translation". That includes stuff like post #404956, which has (properly used) snippets of (originally) English text mixed in with Japanese.

Updated

Kind of agreed.
I see hard_translated as a pejorative implying a second-hand source whose accuracy can't be verified on its own. Which is why uploading originals of hard translated images already posted is encouraged (Old offtopic shit excluded.)

IMO, if someone edited Japanese text onto a comic originally in English and posted it here, the edit would deserve the hard_translated tag and the original wouldn't.

I only see translated making sense when he image has been translated from one language into English, whether by danbooru tl notes or a hard_translation. hard_translated thus implies translated and makes sense any time the image was not in English, but has been unalterably typeset into English before posting. Pretty sure that's what common usage of the tags has been for as long as I can remember.

Yes something like that originally-English Evangelion image complicates things, but how utterly rare an occurrence is that? I'd either not add a translation tag at all if the post were left in Japanese, or if it'd been given tl notes I'd just stick translated on it (obviously) and be done with it.

jxh2154 said:
Yes something like that originally-English Evangelion image complicates things, but how utterly rare an occurrence is that? I'd either not add a translation tag at all if the post were left in Japanese, or if it'd been given tl notes I'd just stick translated on it (obviously) and be done with it.

?

Why don't we implement an originally_english tag for posts that can be verified to include substantive English text from the author (rather than some hard-translator)? If the post also includes some foreign language text that is translated, it would also get a translated and possibly a hard_translated tag, but only if there was some translation done.

The principal problem I see with this is if someone searches translated and expects to query all readable posts, they will miss a few that were tagged originally_english.

Also for foreign hard translation (e.g. English -> Japanese), I would recommend we simply discourage their upload and leave them untagged when they show up. The translated tag has always been shorthand for "translated into English".

葉月 said:
I understood that, but what he said still makes little sense in that context. To me at least, maybe I'm reading it wrong.

My wording was probably confusing, I made it sound like "originally english" and "left in japanese" were about the same post.

I'm working off the basic principle that "translation" on Danbooru refers to rendering non-English into English, as English is the language of the site.

So what I mean is, I would not tag post #500615 as translated, because no translation into English was done. The tag would be incorrect.

If nobody had ever added notes, I would not tag post #500587 as translated either. Yes, it was translated into Japanese by some pixiv user, but that's an incredibly rare occurrence and we're concerned with translation into English. I wouldn't change the "into English" requirement for these very few exceptions.

If someone did add notes, as they did, then post #500587 should, and did, get translated.

Similarly, I would restrict hard_translated to the same criteria as above. If it's never been translated (into English) then it can't be tagged hard_translated either.

If this were danbooru.donmai.jp then we would consider post #500587 to be hard_translated... into Japanese. But that's not relevant to our community.

Shinjidude said: Also for foreign hard translation (e.g. English -> Japanese), I would recommend we simply discourage their upload and leave them untagged when they show up.

Agreed on this. We accept hard_translations into English for practical reasons. However we don't need Japanese (or whatever) hard_translations of images that were originally English, which someone is just then going to soft translate back into English anyway. =P

In this case it was somewhat amusing to see since it's such an anomaly, but I'd never actually *intentionally* upload such a thing.

I know this thread's pretty ancient, but I'm bumping it to make sure jxh's stated positions are still accurate. (I couldn't find any newer discussions in a quick search of the forum, but I might easily have missed something.) The subject came up in a comment I made on post #681732.

The wiki entries for translated and hard_translated still have the "applies even for posts that started out with English text" clauses listed (although they do point to this thread). It seems that the general feeling is, as jxh's posts suggest, that this is no longer the case - but since they're pretty central, I thought I should check before I went editing the wiki entries.

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