Yeah, that’s pretty much the kind of crosstalk I mean—people trying to settle on what the best translation for a line is. There are so many ways to convey nuances of meaning in English that translation shifts into an art form pretty quickly, and I can see that getting a bit distracting for people who are just trying to figure out what a verb form is.
I don’t have time to put together an example right now, but after a bit of thought, my suggestion for a workflow for integrating more complete translations into the thread would be something like:
- Aspiring translator puts their work into a Google Doc (since we’re already using that for a vocab list) and links it in a post.
- People who know what they’re doing look over that doc and add annotations (Ctrl+Alt+M) suggesting changes.
- Return to step 1. Repeat until everyone gets bored.
- Translations that go through that process a time or two get added to a section in the top post, so others can be used for reference.
- We start popularizing the term 訳してみた, by analogy to other Vocaloid/ニコニコ terminology.