Why did a group of our prominent users vote to close this translation question?

Question

I just want to get an understanding because I can't spot the problem and I can't see any prior edits so it doesn't appear this question has been edited or changed

“某些事实被别有用心的人断章取义和利用” in English?

What is wrong with this question? It appears to me that it is a short phrase and it shows some attempt at translating.

Answer 1

There are a couple of reasons why I choose to close this question:

1. OP did not show any attempt to translate the two phrases in question.
2. The English meaning of those two phrases (断章取义 and 别有用心) could have been found easily in a good online dictionary.
3. Every of his questions is "how to say something in English". As we are not a translation service and this site is for people to learn the Chinese language, not the English language, it is clearly a violation of the usage.
4. This question is mainly about stringing a sentence in proper English.
5. Answers to such questions would not benefit anyone learning the Chinese language as these would not need to cover the usage of the difficult phrases nor how they function (as pointed out by user238264 in his answer above).

In the end, does the community wants everyone to ask questions in such a manner? I, for one, wouldn't want that to happen, and so decided to gave that final nail.

Answer 2

At its heart the question was simply asking for the translation of two terms, and the sentence surrounding it was largely irrelevant. I don't think that the intention of the question's asker was malicious, but one could easily dress up many translation questions by embedding them in simple sentences. If "what is the translation of term X?" is a bad question, then so is "what is the translation of term X in this simple sentence?"

In such cases, I would take an attempt at translation to mean an attempt at translating the term in question. This would permit questions were the asker knows what the term generally means, but is trying to understand how it functions in a certain context; and it would rule out questions were the answer is simply a matter of providing a translation for the term.

p.s. Instead of requiring translation questions to show prior effort or research, I think it would be more effective to require the answers to translation questions to be in Chinese, meaning Chinese terms are given Chinese definitions, and Chinese sentences are explained by one or more Chinese sentences with an equivalent meaning.