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While voting to close this question, I noticed that even if we all agree that "translate this sentence for me" questions are not on topic, there isn't a fitting close reason. That question is not unclear, too broad, nor opinion-based (not more than the average question, at least), it is about Italian language and it doesn't belong on another SE community.

Of course I could take the time to type in manually the close reason, but I believe that we could have a standard one for this case. I think we can choose to have more than one custom reason in the "off-topic" section (I believe the moderators can edit them?), so I would suggest to add one.

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  • I'm not sure if we can add a close reason as moderators.
    – Charo Mod
    Commented Nov 3, 2017 at 9:56
  • @Charo Does this still work?
    – Federico Poloni
    Commented Nov 10, 2017 at 10:32
  • This doesn't work to me.
    – Charo Mod
    Commented Nov 10, 2017 at 11:05
  • @Charo Then I'll tag this question feature-request --- if I understand correctly, this notifies the Stack Exchange administrators (so they can chip in and tell us how all of this work).
    – Federico Poloni
    Commented Nov 10, 2017 at 11:41
  • 2
    @Charo you have the Manage Off-Topic Close Reasons section, from where you can define up to three site-specific reasons.
    – fedorqui
    Commented Nov 16, 2017 at 7:38
  • Well, now, thanks to @fedorqui, I know how to do it. The problem is that I'm not sure how to interpret the upvotes this question has received: we agree we should add this close reason or we simply find this question interesting.
    – Charo Mod
    Commented Nov 16, 2017 at 9:30
  • 1
    @Charo recently in Spanish Language we opened the debate in a broader way: Should we reconsider the site-specific close reasons so that they are more usable? (in Spanish). After some brainstorming and multiple (well, three) interesting ideas, we collectively (well, again, the few people involved in Meta) in a new off-topic reason: Questions that show no effort are off-topic. So I think it is best to make the survey explicit so more ideas can pop up.
    – fedorqui
    Commented Nov 16, 2017 at 10:01
  • @Charo I'll add an answer suggesting to add that close reason, so that we can compare up/downvotes to the answers.
    – Federico Poloni
    Commented Nov 16, 2017 at 11:22

2 Answers 2

Reset to default
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Yes, we should add a close reason for this use case.

Proposed wording (corrections and suggestions for improvement are welcome):

This website is not a translation service: questions that ask to translate a text, without further motivation, are considered off-topic. If you are uncertain about a certain word or nuance of meaning, please edit the question mentioning the exact issue, including your attempts at translation, and describing your doubts.

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  • 1
    I'm not sure that 4 votes is enough to do the change you propose. But since, as you can see, there is few participation on Meta lately, I will do it.
    – Charo Mod
    Commented Dec 15, 2017 at 9:10
  • 2
    The closing reason is now on line (thanks to @Charo)
    – egreg Mod
    Commented Dec 21, 2017 at 14:21
  • 1
    Now that we have used this closing reason for the first time, I think that maybe we should change the expression "translate a single sentence" because sometimes the translation request is for a text composed of several sentences. Maybe we can say "translate a text" instead.
    – Charo Mod
    Commented Dec 22, 2017 at 18:24
  • @egreg: As a moderator, what do you think about the modification I have proposed?
    – Charo Mod
    Commented Dec 23, 2017 at 16:06
  • @Charo The change you suggest looks good to me.
    – Federico Poloni
    Commented Dec 23, 2017 at 16:25
  • @Charo Probably it's better with “a text”.
    – egreg Mod
    Commented Dec 23, 2017 at 16:26
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While I agree with the spirit of this question, technically the “no translation” case already fits within “off topic”, since the complete phrasing is “This question does not appear to be about Italian language, within the scope defined in the help center”, and the page in the help centre describing what is on topic explicitly lists “Translation requests” (with a link to the relevant Meta question) under

But please, don’t ask any questions about the following topics. They are out of scope for this site.

In other words, “on topic” doesn't simply mean “anything somehow involving Italian language”, and that page clarifies (or at least exemplifies) what is and what isn't.

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