Language Tag for comics?

Mad Black

I wonder if we could create special language tags for comics, to create an easier way to watch and filter comics in different language, including a tag for english. Or rather using the existing tags more constantly.
Because it is sometimes very annoying to see a comic, you can’t see on the thumbnail what language it is, because it is so long, click on, expand it and then notice you can’t read it. That is annoying and wasteful in regards of time and Mbits. Now someone might think, just use your mouse and hover over it and check for it beforehand. Well on tablet you can’t do that, and you have to check every single line of tags for that. A language:xxx would help for that too, btw.

A tag with language:english, would be pretty handy for reversed filters, if english is the only language you speak and hide all the other language tags out. Thought regular tags like english exist as well, but they aren’t as widely used. Also sometimes there might be an comic in multiple languages, but only one word or phrase is in another language, which makes filtering hard. For that scenario we could tag the main language + the additional one, or maybe they are only talking about an other language, aka. french=speaking fancy. Which would then could be tagged with language:english + french.

If not, I guess a wider use of the english tag would be sufficient enough for that purpose. It would require a lot of retagging anyway. One way would require to retag every comic, while the other variation would require only most of it.

I do not think that it would be necessary to retag every text, caption post on the site thought, that would be kinda overkill. Even if it would be consequential.

Posted 6 years ago Report
Edited 6 years ago

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LightningBolt

Senior Moderator

Undead inside

You (may not know)) that I love things to be fair and consistent, so my OCD would bug me if we tagged every language but English as assuming things is never fun to me

That being said, it would indeed be more work, but with mod tools it would be faster, plus, I like your idea as a whole, tho I am not sure how many people would utilize it.

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WingbeatPony

Tag horse

I think so as not to let this become a rampantly overused/misused set of tags, these should be called [language] text ie. “spanish text” or “japanese text.” In fact, due to the overwhelming number of comics that are in English due to lingua franca, I’d discourage the use of “english text” entirely, relying on the translation tag instead for locating comics/etc. that have multiple language options available.

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Mad Black

You (may not know)) that I love things to be fair and consistent, so my OCD would bug me if we tagged every language but English as assuming things is never fun to me

That being said, it would indeed be more work, but with mod tools it would be faster, plus, I like your idea as a whole, tho I am not sure how many people would utilize it.

Thank you for that. I wouldn’t mind tagging it manualy myself. But I think the most I tagged on a single day was 800 images, and that took a lot of time.

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WingbeatPony

Tag horse

Or, since LB posted while I was typing that comment, and we want consistency:
How about we use these tags in conjunction with translation request so as to help translators find these things?

I would advise against changing how the english tag is used, by the way. Its current use points mainly to direct references to the word “English,” and honestly I think that’s something worth keeping in mind.

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Mad Black

I’d discourage the use of “english text” entirely, relying on the translation tag instead for locating comics/etc. that have multiple language options available.

Well, there is one slight problem with that. Doujinshi are usually in Japanese and get often translated into english, and other languages as well. Tought I don’t know if anybody every uploaded a french/spanish/italien translation of doujin on the site, but whatever. I saw some in Chinese and Korean thought.

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WingbeatPony

Tag horse

@Mad Black
In that case, let me revise my original idea and suggest “[language] translation” as the naming convention for these tags, to reflect their usage?

I know I don’t always come up with the perfect solution on the first try, I’d like to meet anyone who can. But my ideas always come to me complete, so helping me understand the issue better is always more useful than telling me what’s wrong with my idea, so I thank you for that!

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Mad Black

I would advise against changing how the english tag is used, by the way. Its current use points mainly to direct references to the word “English,” and honestly I think that’s something worth keeping in mind.

Yeah, I thought of that as well. That is why a language:english tag for comics would be more useful.

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Mad Black

@Mad Black
In that case, let me revise my original idea and suggest “[language] translation” as the naming convention for these tags, to reflect their usage?

So you mean a tag like english (translation), I guess that would work too, might be too specific. But consequential we would need a french (translation), german (translation), spanish (translation) and such things as well. Which might take awhile to figure out what is a translation in the first place, since some artist are bilingual, we probably would have to tag both versions with translation?
So I still would prefer my language suggestion to that, and retag all comics.

I know I don’t always come up with the perfect solution on the first try, I’d like to meet anyone who can. But my ideas always come to me complete, so helping me understand the issue better is always more useful than telling me what’s wrong with my idea, so I thank you for that!

Yeah I know that feeling. The idea with the language tag is since months in my mind. And I still can’t really figure out how to deal with it the best way. I even requested an stupid idea yesterday in the request thread.
But it is good to have a nice discussion about it going.

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Mad Black

Another thing about the language tags, users wouldn’t need a complex filter for it, if they really are only used on comics. Just put them in your spoiler or hide list and you don’t have to deal with it again.

If I would do that now I would have to do complexx filter setting like that. Spoiler: comic AND (spanish OR french OR italien OR korean Or japanese (AND NOT 4 koma)) and the thumbnail would look like the usual spoiler image, I click on it, see a comic, and don’t necessarily know why it is in my complex filter, because it could be because of the language or anything else on my list.
But if it is only a regular spoiler like language:spanish, (maybe even with it’s own cute spoilerimage,) I know what it is, I can click on it and see how long it is. When it is a multiple page comic I don’t have to expand it. If it is a cute short 1 to 4 panel comic, with little text, I still might be able to understand what is going on and have a laugh anyway.

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WingbeatPony

Tag horse

@Mad Black
I was thinking more like just english translation, no extra punctuation to complicate matters. As for the original language a comic is posted in, I see no real issue using the “translation” tags on those, too - sure, it’s not technically a translation, but I don’t think anyone would mind given the context.

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quoting_mungo

Gusty is best pony

I think <language> text would be my preferred tag of the ones suggested; it’s very clear from the tag what images it should apply to.

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Vree

The core request seems to be: please tag every picture as “english”, because reverse filtering every other language tag (“japanese” “spanish” etc.) is too hard for me, and I don’t want to accidentally open pictures in languages I can’t read.

It’s up to you if you want to do that; personally I think that MadBlack SHOULD be able to filter other languages in a backward way and save us another auto-include tag (beside artist:_ and safe/explicit) but it’s up to the moderators whether they think it’s a good idea.

But let’s leave the translation tags out of this. The tagging custom is translated, translation request and the language tag (eg. spanish) as it is on other Boorus and it’s fine.
I mean if you want to change the language tags to be: language:spanish, language:japanese etc. that’s also fine with me; the same groupings have already been done for OCs, seaspon tags etc.
But there’s no benefit to having to type translation:(3 stars) when I want to search.
(Don’t forget the “translated in the description” tag, by the way.)

It doesn’t seem to me that this has anything much to do with giving MadBlack what he wants.

Besides MadBlack, surely you want to be able to take images tagged with “translated in the description” OUT of your filter, right?
So think this through, how much of the filter you’ll have to build for your needs are you actually escaping?

If collecting every language tag for the filter is a chore, the site can just add a sample filter to the Global Filters list called English Only or something and then users can just lift the list from there for their own filters.
(But changing them to language:x as above suggested would simplify finding them, too.)

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quoting_mungo

Gusty is best pony

@Vree
I’m not seeing how tagging content that has text in a specific language with a specific tag for “this has text in <language>” constitutes an auto-include tag, to be honest. Most images I see posted don’t have text on them at all.

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Vree

@quoting_mungo
Fair enough. I guess “language:english” would still only be displayed on less than 10% of DB pictures. (Judging by the sizes of “comic” “text” and such tags.)

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Vree

TBH comics need two different fixes:
the ability to add separate preview images (as comics become an incomprehensible mess of dots when shrunk), and some sort of colored dot in the corner of the preview image that’ll tell users if the comic is in English or another language (say, a green dot or no dot for English language, a blue dot for Asian languages (Japanese/Korean/Chinese etc.), etc. - based on what the most common languages on DB are).

Take DoubleWBrothers’ comics. They are wonderfully made, and take far more time to create than just a single panel, but because of DB’s nature single panel takeouts are guaranteed to have far more views and votes,
and this is entirely the fault of the “shrunken image” previews (which doom the majority of big comics on this site) and the inability to sort between English and non-English pictures. Even if you’re already a DWB fan you’ll have difficulty locating any one comic page you may be looking for.
At least on PC you can hover over previews and try to figure out what you’ll be getting based on the tag preview.
THis doesn’t work on many other modern devices like phones or iPads tho.

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quoting_mungo

Gusty is best pony

Which might take awhile to figure out what is a translation in the first place, since some artist are bilingual, we probably would have to tag both versions with translation?
So I still would prefer my language suggestion to that, and retag all comics.

I would honestly expect a “translation” tag to work similar to the “edit” tag; the original artist’s work is never a translation, just a version that happens to be in a different language.

@Vree

TBH comics need two different fixes:
the ability to add separate preview images (as comics become an incomprehensible mess of dots when shrunk), and some sort of colored dot in the corner of the preview image that’ll tell users if the comic is in English or another language (say, a green dot or no dot for English language, a blue dot for Asian languages (Japanese/Korean/Chinese etc.), etc. - based on what the most common languages on DB are).

I’m not sure there’s enough colors to give enough sensible language groups distinct colors. Like, I’d accept Swedish sharing a color with Danish and Norwegian, as they’re at least sorta mutually intelligible, but lumping Japanese/Chinese/Korean together would be pretty useless to most speakers of one of those languages. Who would decide what languages were to be grouped together?

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Background Pony #8FB4

Why not use nationality flags if we want to indicate language in the thumbnail? And i’m a fan of “language:” tags.

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Vree

@quoting_mungo
Also, I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s not just other languages that are a problem, a similarly big one is text edits.
Like dozens of versions for a pic that replace the original with stuff like “hail HYDRA!” or whatever and so many that you can’t even locate the original anymore.

What if there was ONE color border for non-English translations (even if it was the original - this is an English speaking site) around preview images, and maybe a second color border for text edits and the like?

@Background Pony #7301
That’s a good idea if it can be done.

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Mad Black

The way WEBM are now presented on the site, with a headline on the thumbnail, that is actually the way I would like to present the different languages on comics. Wouldn’t that be a good and easy solution to it?

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WingbeatPony

Tag horse

@Mad Black
Not a bad thought, although I’d tack on the caveat that any feature request that obscures the thumbnail in some way has an option to disable it in user settings or hide according to spoiler preferences. Especially with comics, given the current issues with tiny-stick-o-vision on particularly long images…I feel like it’s an issue that extends beyond the scope of this thread or even this subforum. But yeah, there’s a tradeoff between the importance of the information and the real estate that takes.
If presented in a text format, then, I’d prefer at least two pieces of information to justify a banner across the whole thumbnail. Even “Comic (EN)” or other two-letter common language designation would do.

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