Reviews reporting thread

Easy Money wrote: At a well known English language based jazz site that I like to frequent, if a non-English review shows up, it is left intact and then an English translation is tacked on following the original review, thereby making everyone happy .

A perfectly sensible compromise.

As to whether or not you can make the effort, that is up to you. I don’t even make the effort to read every review that is posted. But if it is an album that looks interesting, I do. And if it were in a foreign language, and my interest were piqued, then I would translate it. Conversely, when I come across a badly translated review, I move on.

As to this only recently becoming an issue or a problem, I think that’s a silly thing to say. Just because it’s only now being discussed doesn’t mean it hasn’t always been a problem. One of the very first things I noticed when I came to this site over a decade ago was the badly translated reviews. Just because you are happy with it, doesn’t mean everyone else is.

And I completely disagree with weeding out reviews based on people deciding they are poorly worded. Much of the poorly worded reviews are a result of the insistence of writing reviews in English, and they are actually very good reviews otherwise. Some of the foreign language reviews that have cropped up on the site in the last few weeks are better written than some of the native English reviews, but they would be poorly worded if run through Google Translate.

Cristi, improving your writing proficiency in a written foreign language is a process that takes enormous time and effort - as I am sure you know. Being a professional language teacher (and occasionally translator), I can tell you that many people never learn to write properly in a second language, in spite of being very fluent in speaking. Saying that people "should make an effort" to learn English properly before writing a review is not very nice, because everyone that effort is so huge that it's not doable by everyone. However, there are lots of people who - in spite of not being able to write in good English - are very good at writing in their native language, and can produce a review that is worth reading because of its content. That's the case of the Italian guy who posted the review that sparked this discussion.

Anyway, you'd be surprised at the number of people who make the effort of using Google Translate when they find something they are interested in written in a language they don't know. A practical example? Food recipes. There are lots of great food sites in Italian, and many people who don't know the language use Google Translate to understand a recipe.