Translation Golf (draft stage)
In Spanish.SE we used to have quite a lot of fun with the Translation Golf: we would pick some English text and the goal was to translate it into Spanish using the less amount of characters as possible, but keeping the meaning of the original text.
Here in Linguistics we cannot assume the knowledge of any language other than English, since each one of us may know a different set of them.
For this, I was thinking in two levels:
- What about having a game consisting in challenging the 'compression' of a given text in English? This would mean finding shorter ways to express something, shorter synonyms, and so on.
- If the above had enough support, what about having a category for challenges like this?
In the same vein as site proposals, please comment your interest below.
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I've drafted sample translation-golf challenge post, and am planning on posting it on Saturday (if no one objects). Feel free to suggest any changes you might want to make.
In an effort to drum up activity (given we haven't had any in over a week), I present the first translation golf!
Before entering, please read the ground rules. The aim of the game is to translate a given text using as few characters as possible.
The first text is quite simple, it's the welcome text for our community.
Welcome to Languages & Linguistics, our community for anyone interested in specific (human) languages, language and its constructs more generally, or linguistics.
As the community is still small, any target language is allowed (including English! Try to shrink the text). Translations will compete within the same language, just like code golf.
Letter counter for submissions: https://jsfiddle.net/2ermv0rh/2/
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The community seems positive so far. There are concerns about disrupting the main Q&A with an entirely different type of posts, but there are also concerns about if these games will have enough activity to merit a category of their own.
Proposed course of action:
- Host these here on meta for now, using the "games" tag created by this post.
- If these become reasonably popular and active over time, we can then move them from meta to a new category.
- For recurring types of games, make a meta post with the general rules per game.
Ground Rules (draft)
This is loosely based off of the original translation golf on StackExchange, but modified to fit a wider range of languages.
Goal: Translate a given text using the minimum number of characters
- The translation must be accurate
- Unless otherwise stated, the translation must be grammatically correct.
- If using a dialect, the dialect must be specified, and the translation must solely use that dialect
- If there is a question of whether something is grammatical, consult some authoritative source (or ask here on L&L!)
- If there is a question of whether a word exists, consult a dictionary or other authoritative source.
- The original poster must provide an example translation (whether golfed or non-golfed)
- Spaces and punctuation do not count as letters.
- Abbreviations may or may not be allowed, depending on the original poster[1]
- If the source text does not specify gender, any gender may be used in the translation
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A divergence from the StackExchange rules, but sometimes the source text uses it and it would be a bit odd to exclude them from answers in that case. ↩︎
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