Hello, first time forum user so I apologize if this is in the wrong category. While taking a look at the wiki page for translations (https://e621.net/wiki_pages/48553) I notice it mentions to "avoid submitting trivial[...]translation notes," and I'm not entirely sure what counts as trivial. I've done a few smaller translations before, feel free to look through my post changes and see some examples, and while I find it nice practice to go through the translation_request tag and knock out some less intense ones, I also don't want to be seen as disruptive or a bad translator for doing this. The crux of the issue is really that I'm not sure what would be trivial or not, and would like to be able to contribute to thinning out the workload for other, better translators without being a nuisance. Any clarification would be appreciated, thanks!

P.S. the "mark as translated" feature is nice, thanks for taking out the tag management from the process.

If they don't reply here, you could always DMail Lafcadio for more clarification, they're the one who wrote up most of the translation guidance.

I'm not too familiar with these guidelines, so take my advice with a grain of salt, but I'd imagine that the majority of non-English content should be translated, and examples of trivial translation notes would be the kind of people that translate "dont" to "don't" in the middle of an English sentence, or loan words that are already common in English and don't need further explanation.

Unless you're adding notes to English words to translate them to emoji equivalents, or something along those lines, you're probably fine.
The intent is to restrict "Why bother?"-tier notes, but even when it comes to translation, there are plenty of non-obvious translations that seem like they might be obvious. To pull a few examples from Wikipedia's article on false friends ...

• The Spanish "embarazada" (pregnant) has no relation to the English "embarrassed".
• The German "Gift" (poison) has no relation to the English "gift".

Additionally: most people don't learn multiple scripts. Even if an image only features a single elementary-school-level kanji, as long as your translation is correct, it should constitute a decent, non-trivial translation note.

lafcadio said:

stuff

Unless you're adding notes to English words to translate them to emoji equivalents, or something along those lines, you're probably fine.
The intent is to restrict "Why bother?"-tier notes, but even when it comes to translation, there are plenty of non-obvious translations that seem like they might be obvious. To pull a few examples from Wikipedia's article on false friends ...

• The Spanish "embarazada" (pregnant) has no relation to the English "embarrassed".
• The German "Gift" (poison) has no relation to the English "gift".

Additionally: most people don't learn multiple scripts. Even if an image only features a single elementary-school-level kanji, as long as your translation is correct, it should constitute a decent, non-trivial translation note.

How about correcting the spelling of english words. Would that be considered as trivial?

snpthecat said:
How about correcting the spelling of english words. Would that be considered as trivial?

I don't think this is my decision to make. Not all uses of notes are translations, sometimes people use notes for things like e621 post recursion.

snpthecat said:
How about correcting the spelling of english words. Would that be considered as trivial?

I'd say it might be best to avoid this for the most part unless the misspelling makes the sentence difficult to parse. like, correcting "its" to "it's" and "breath" to "breathe" are usually going to be pretty pointless, and doing it multiple times on the same post can especially seem petty or condescending.

I think the only real "trivial" translation is something like "piñata" -> "piñata", or translating a bilingual comic that already has all text translated to English anyways, or maybe translating a signature.

As my own unofficial rule, when it comes to very excessive onomatopoeia spam or uninteresting text_on_clothing (or I suppose any other unimportant non-dialogue), I consider how important or interesting the text is versus how obnoxious its placement is (e.g. is it hard to find a good way to place the note without covering a character's face?) and make a judgement call on if it's worth translating.

snpthecat said:
How about correcting the spelling of english words. Would that be considered as trivial?

My vote's to that being trivial, in most circumstances it doesn't actually help and comes off as rude.

strikerman said:
My vote's to that being trivial, in most circumstances it doesn't actually help and comes off as rude.

I agree with this, correcting a spelling mistake is trivial, anybody with basic English knowledge can tell what the word was supposed to be. It only really serves to insult the artists' English abilities.

Unless it's something like post #4107906 or post #4107903. Having to read that text without the translation notes would hurt my brain even more than the rest of that pool's contents hurts my soul.

Not sure if this has been asked before or not, but are character markings or tattoos considered to be trivial translations?
I can imagine someone's OC being covered in non-English text (e.g., having Chinese/Japanese/Nordic symbols on their skin) and then having to "translate" each tattoo for every post they appear on, even though it does not build onto the scene.
What about untranslated text in background objects or scenes (e.g., store signs, food menus, text on objects, etc.)?

I know for either scenario that you would still tag the respective *_text for them, but would translators appreciate it if those posts were not tagged with translation_request?
In other words, was there ever a problem with trivial translation requests?

darryus said:
I'd say it might be best to avoid this for the most part unless the misspelling makes the sentence difficult to parse. like, correcting "its" to "it's" and "breath" to "breathe" are usually going to be pretty pointless, and doing it multiple times on the same post can especially seem petty or condescending.

Weird. I always saw it being used as a note if artist ever redoes the script. I guess some people are hypercritical/go overboard, though?

faucet said:
I agree with this, correcting a spelling mistake is trivial, anybody with basic English knowledge can tell what the word was supposed to be. It only really serves to insult the artists' English abilities.

Unless it's something like post #4107906 or post #4107903. Having to read that text without the translation notes would hurt my brain even more than the rest of that pool's contents hurts my soul.

LOL, sooooo many typos on that one... in Spanish.

thegreatwolfgang said:
Not sure if this has been asked before or not, but are character markings or tattoos considered to be trivial translations?
I can imagine someone's OC being covered in non-English text (e.g., having Chinese/Japanese/Nordic symbols on their skin) and then having to "translate" each tattoo for every post they appear on, even though it does not build onto the scene.
What about untranslated text in background objects or scenes (e.g., store signs, food menus, text on objects, etc.)?

I know for either scenario that you would still tag the respective *_text for them, but would translators appreciate it if those posts were not tagged with translation_request?
In other words, was there ever a problem with trivial translation requests?

thegreatwolfgang said:
Not sure if this has been asked before or not, but are character markings or tattoos considered to be trivial translations?
I can imagine someone's OC being covered in non-English text (e.g., having Chinese/Japanese/Nordic symbols on their skin) and then having to "translate" each tattoo for every post they appear on, even though it does not build onto the scene.
What about untranslated text in background objects or scenes (e.g., store signs, food menus, text on objects, etc.)?

I know for either scenario that you would still tag the respective *_text for them, but would translators appreciate it if those posts were not tagged with translation_request?
In other words, was there ever a problem with trivial translation requests?

Wouldn't you normally put that in character Wiki?

thegreatwolfgang said:

What about untranslated text in background objects or scenes (e.g., store signs, food menus, text on objects, etc.)?

I think it wouldn't be trivial if it's an establishing shot. if it's a background element, might be a case by case basis.

thegreatwolfgang said:
Not sure if this has been asked before or not, but are character markings or tattoos considered to be trivial translations?
I can imagine someone's OC being covered in non-English text (e.g., having Chinese/Japanese/Nordic symbols on their skin) and then having to "translate" each tattoo for every post they appear on, even though it does not build onto the scene.
What about untranslated text in background objects or scenes (e.g., store signs, food menus, text on objects, etc.)?

I know for either scenario that you would still tag the respective *_text for them, but would translators appreciate it if those posts were not tagged with translation_request?
In other words, was there ever a problem with trivial translation requests?

Translate all of these if you're willing to do so.

The nature of translation means that non-speakers can't fully determine whether a particular bit of non-dialogue text is noteworthy. Tattoos, labels, and background text can crack jokes or provide additional info about a scene.
post #1638251 post #1098491 post #2291436 post #3895813 post #3784189 post #3784592

SFX can also be super-relevant because they might depict actual spoken words, even if they're not framed like dialogue (no speech bubble, no dialogue box, etc.)