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I'd rather you didn't do that. We have enough people translating things on danbooru, and you're just taking away opportunities to translate. If you find an english version somewhere, just post a link to it in a comment.

Are you saying it's better to have people translate something again that's already been translated elsewhere? That sounds like a waste of the translator's time.

piespy said:
Are you saying it's better to have people translate something again that's already been translated elsewhere?

That's exactly what he's saying.

That sounds like a waste of the translator's time.

Not considering the average quality of translations around the internet. Compare for instance post #124111 and post #131647.

葉月 said:
Not considering the average quality of translations around the internet. Compare for instance post #124111 and post #131647.

They're written differently, but they say essentially the same thing. What are we supposed to notice here?

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But there are word patterns that are used in one language that sound different in another. The hard-translated version of that comic strip sound a lot more natural than the Danbooru soft-translation. The Danbooru one sounds like the guy speaking is Data from Next Gen.

Besides that, there are many occasions when if you translated it literally, or even as an approximation, it wouldn't work. For example, when it's raining heavily someone may say "It's raining cats and dogs" (maybe this is a British rather than an American thing) whereas in the same situation a French person may say a phrase that makes no sense when translated: "Ropes are falling from the sky!"

If you translated it you may just play it safe and say "It's pouring down out there!" or you may try and preserve the idiomatic nature of the statement and put it as "It's raining cats and dogs!" which, technically, is a totally different sentence. Yet the latter is really more accurate in the sense that the person used an idiom rather than simply stating in plain language that it's raining heavily.

While you can generally translate between European languages "literally", you can't translate their idioms and colloquialisms in the same way. In that respect, I feel that much of Japanese should be treated as if translating idioms. I've seen so many supposedly correct Jap-Eng translations that have everyone talking like robots or using really unnatural turns of phrase frequently. "Just like Suzuki-senpai to know that answer!" sounds odd; in English you'd say "I knew you'd get it!" or something like that.

Man, I accidently started reading this and got totally distracted by these long-ass paragraphs. Kinda like hidden traps for easily distracted people like me. (:|