Danbooru

Meaningless note edits

Posted under General

When translating onomatopoeia, I tend to prefer enclosing the 'word with double asterisks (eg: *snip*) to make it clearer.

Some other translators appear to do the same as well

Recently there's a user (kounishinn) who goes around editing onomatopoeia by removing asterisks and changing most of the words into all lower-case. He also has done virtually no original translation, or at least this is what a quick poke around his notes' list tells me.

I find this incredibly annoying. I'm not claiming that one method of notation is superior over another; just that translators should be able to use their preferred method of transcribing. (assuming there are no mistakes.)

I feel like he's basically stepping over my toes for no good reason.

Updated by 葉月

Independent on our policy on correcting other people's notes (which I don't think is a bad idea), I'd like to throw my support behind using asterisks with onomatopoeia. I think it is useful to make obvious what is translated as words and what is translated as sounds/actions.

Updated

I have used asterisks in the past, but in recent times I've been using italics and all uppercase, especially when using font size and color effects. Generally, I would advocate not using asterisks except in cases with possible ambiguity, but in the interest of consistency with other positions of mine, I support the right of translators to use whatever they want so long as it's not blatantly unclear.

evazion said:
Using asterisks is a bit silly when notes support bold and italics tags. Asterisks are usually only used as a workaround in situations where you're limited to plain text.

I've been using asterisks for a while now because I typically use italics for thought bubbles or internal conversation, and I save bold for emphasis.

That's what I do, anyway.

Crud. I seem to have caused some offense, which I certainly didn't intend, and I apologise for that.

I've replied to the dmail already, but since it's been raised on the forum, I should explain my position. It's previously been my view that *asterisks* and _underscores_ and the like are substitutes for proper typography: people use them either when the medium doesn't support bold or italics, or when they can't bothered messing with HTML or BBCode or the markup flavour of the moment. And this is fine; time is short for many people, and having pretty text is far less significant than doing the translation in the first place.

As NNescio observes, I haven't done much original translation on Danbooru. I've done some, but it takes me a long time and my Japanese skills are very limited. As such, note cleanup - repositioning large or misaligned notes, typo fixes, and adding formatting to notes that didn't have it - is a more practical way I can contribute most of the time. It's hardly anything compared to what the active translators contribute, of course, but it's something.

What I hadn't considered was that some people might actually prefer the unstyled form. Obviously, looking at the replies to this thread so far, quite a lot of people - possibly most people, though the thread is a very limited sample - do. I'd already told NNescio by dmail that I'd leave his/her note styling alone; clearly I should expand that to all asterisked notes, no matter how much I think it looks ugly. So I will, and I apologise again to anyone I've offended.

I still think using asterisks and italics on the same note is an offence against good taste, though.

kounishin said:
I still think using asterisks and italics on the same note is an offence against good taste, though.

Noted, but not agreed-upon.

I do always put sound effects in italics, but bolding and other forms of text formatting are things I do to match what I think is the appropriate level of emphasis in the original text. It may not add much extra meaning per se, but it does help match the impact of the original, and as a fan of comic art and its relation to literary effect, I feel it's quite appropriate.

However, I also prefer to put thought-text in italics as well. This is purely an aesthetic choice, but I do like it that way. It does create the problem of occasionally making it difficult to determine, via text formatting alone, whether something is supposed to be a thought or a sound effect (especially considering the popularity of unusual sound effects made out of nouns and verbs!).

My solution is to put thoughts in italics, and sound effects in both italics and bracketing asterisks. This way, the style I use is at least fairly uniform.

I tend to the view that the difference between thoughts and sound effects should generally be clear from context (eg, full sentences versus a random verb or adjective), and that if the difference isn't clear, then it probably wasn't all that important anyway.

I do acknowledge your point, though, especially with the likes of some of the stuff in the Unconventional SFX pool. I usually render sound effects in all lower-case as a cue to them not being dialogue. Still, different strokes and all that, so I'll shut up now.

@kounishin: Thanks for the quick reply.

On a related note, I often use italics if the original text appears to be written in a scratchy/cursive/'handwritten' font. The use of such 'fonts' is also sometimes not restricted to onomatopoeia, and as such, I prefer to have a unique identifier (asterisks, in my case) for the latter.

Since the use of both asterisks and italics (in the same note) appears to be objectionable to some people's sensibilities, I suppose I can use alternative fonts instead. The problem is that I don't know how to do so, as I'm not exactly familiar with CSS Fonts.

FWIW, I use asterisks myself, and am perfectly fine with how they look, even in the face of "proper" typography being available. In other words, asterisks seem perfectly proper to me when applied to onomatopoeia.

1