Minoru Kuwahara | Hello,
I may have several suggestions regarding this language pair and also probably for the other pairs as well.
1. As pointed out last time by some members, this "Translation Contest" looks like not necessarily validated just by voting and selecting only one winner per language pair. I'm not referring specifically to this round's winner, Mr. Jones, of course, but even a won entry could involve certain negative elements over other posters' entries, for example, in view of terminology, phrasing, style, metaphor, paraphrasing, paragraphing, and importantly flow of sentences, and so forth. I wonder if any instrument to address this aspect could be implemented in the future rounds of contests.
2: I know I should be aware just picking up mis-translations is not a determining factor to select "a" winner per pair. But also, I may doubt if entries with higher points from voters could truly never involve less mis-translations over other entries, just as a matter of fact (truly considering the source texts are not a "piece of cake"). In that sense, I realized voters' views for selecting entries can be pretty much biased. To this, for example, voters, too, have some "responsibility" for selecting entries to show his/her name, which could be reversed, and put some kinds of comments for reasons why he/she selects entries in terms of the factors stated above, etc.
3: Personally, I feel it may be important to know whether a voter is a native speaker of the target language or not, considering all voters are equally allocated of points to vote, especially in the case of Japanese or probably some other non-European languages. This should be related much more to the quality of linguistic subtleness.
4: Somehow unfortunately, mis-alignment of characters obviously is occurring in all entries in Japanese to this contest. This is a technical issue, so I hope this, too, should be fixed in the future.
For now, I suggest these things I was noticing for some time long.
Thank you for your attentions.
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