Sorry, superking, it IS about showing off. Why would someone want to write in Chinese in an English forum, otherwise? Surely there are gadzillions of Chinese forums out there?
You don’t see our resident experts in Mandarin, Ironlady, Taffy, Poagao, Dragonbones, et al waffling off, do you?
Ha ha: you said Ass!
[quote=“jimipresley”]Sorry, superking, it IS about showing off. Why would someone want to write in Chinese in an English forum, otherwise? Surely there are gadzillions of Chinese forums out there?
You don’t see our resident experts in Mandarin, Ironlady, Taffy, Poagao, Dragonbones, et al waffling off, do you?[/quote]
True, I’m just trying to ask politely and keep the request polite. It’s an experiment I am working on.
Totally agree that everything posted in Mandarin (or any other language, except for the German forum which is set up for that purpose) should be translated/glossed. (And use proper Pinyin while yer at it…but that’s another issue. 
)
In the Learning Chinese forum, at least, I think we have been fairly consistent about asking people to translate or going back in and “helping” with translations or Romanization. It’s in our forum sticky rules (not that anyone reads THAT…) Hopefully other forum mods will agree. If there’s something of the short-comment variety that needs translating and the mod can’t do it, they need only PM one of us.
The “report” button would also work – no need to report a cataclysm, just say there’s stuff that needs to be translated. But posters who know enough to post in Chinese should have enough courtesy to help the community understand what they’re posting, IMO.
What if the only known source (the only one known to the poster, that is) of a piece of news or other information is in Mandarin, and the discoverer of the source can pretty much see the gist of the pertinent part(s) of it but can’t properly translate it?
In that case don’t post it, but just link to it? Or don’t even link to it? I’m not protesting, just asking, for my own future guidance.
This happens a lot with breaking news – usually the contributor posts the article and asks if someone could translate it. I’ve seen some posters give the Google translation but that usually ends up being more for laughs.