The problem of effortless questions arises on basically every StackExchange site in one form or another, and each community needs to decide on a trade-off of being welcoming and attracting new users vs. maintaining a respectable level of quality.
My impression is that the best approach is:
- gradually raise the minimum quality threshold as site activity grows [increasing it too fast or too slow are both problematic]; and
- ensure good-quality questions and answers are consistently highly upvoted (Vote Early, Vote Often!) and judging from the Chinese.SE voters, voting needs to be significantly encouraged here.
At this stage, I suggest focusing on exemplifying and encouraging high-quality content (i.e., the pearls), rather than weeding out low quality content (i.e., the sand).
Nevertheless...
Suggestion for What does X say? questions
If the simple solution answer the question, don't upvote it, and move on is not considered a suitable approach...
Perhaps create a general What does X say? question, and give a high-quality answer to it, listing typical examples, and giving a self-help guide for how to translate arbitrary Chinese text (e.g., tattoos). Afterwards, close specific What does X say? questions as duplicates of the general question.
Why suggest this?
On Islam.SE, we did this: we get many questions of the form Is X halal? (i.e., permissible in Islam). These questions are often effortless and uninteresting to experts, and we generally felt they were lowering the quality of the site.
The approach taken at Islam.SE was to create a general Is X halal? question, and simply close specific questions as a duplicate of the general question. There's two main benefits I can think of:
While the question gets closed, the OP (along with the question's audience) is directed to a reasonable answer to their question---it's more helpful than declaring their question "off topic" (despite being about the Chinese language) and linking to site regulations unrelated to the question.
The question gets marked
This question already has an answer here: ...
instead of
This question does not appear to be about Chinese language [sic] within the scope defined in the help center.