Publish as translation or post?

Question

Machine translation from one language to another

Good afternoon.

I recently visited Habré and ran into one dilemma, the solution of which I did not find on the site. There is interesting Western material that I would like to present on this site. There is even a special type of post - a translation, which, it seems, is intended for this. But the fact is that I am far from always inclined to consider my “work” as a translation. What is it connected with?

Firstly, I believe that the translator must remain neutral when translating material. Do not add your assessments, comments (except for some clarifications, of course) or conclusions. His own point of view must not distort the material. Otherwise, it turns out that this is no longer a translation, but rather an abstraction. This means that you can not put this case in the "translation".

Secondly, the material in the original article may not be entirely suitable for translation into Habr, which means that it will need to be supplemented, changed, refined, further analyzed, etc.

But, as it turned out, this opinion, which seems to be logical, is not shared by all users. For example, I recently published a post , which, for the reasons indicated above, was not designed as a translation (I had a very free interpretation of the content, plus my own code analysis and conclusions). Of course, all links were added at the end, thereby confirming that I was essentially summarizing the material. But the very first comment on the publication, as well as one of the last ones, confirmed the doubt of other users in my choice.

Of course, in general, the publication was rated positively, which allows me to conclude that, generally speaking, I did everything right. But I cannot help but take into account that there were several comments with the opposite opinion, plus, other users voted positively for some of them.

Therefore, I had such a question - how to publish posts correctly, based on the above arguments? Translation, as some users wanted, or still a post, following the arguments that I gave and which, albeit indirectly, were appreciated by a larger number of users (the post, by the way, went to the main page and stayed there for some time)

Answer 1

Your opinion is correct.
It is also true that the reader's doubts are unpleasant. Therefore, these doubts should be specifically addressed. For this purpose, it would be nice to indicate next to the hyperlink to the original source that the original source is not just translated, but retold with additions.
Perhaps, in some cases, it makes sense to give such an indication not even after, but before you start writing a blog post. So that it immediately affects the readers. As an example, I'll point to the introductory word I prefaced my own blog post, " John Resig's Self-Invoking Constructor and Reflection on Why This Solution Didn't Catch " last year.

Answer 2

I fully support your choice that publishing an entry in this vein is better as a "post".
If there is, as you indicated, links to the original, then this is more than enough.