Am I the only one that thinks those hard-translation are like, TOTALLY useless? Post those on 4chan or whatever place you want, but not here, since there already are translations on the original ones...
I honestly have no right to be speaking here due to obvious bias, but: What about people that would like to have a hard-translated version for such exploitation after finding the original here?
I don't care either way, since I ignore hard-translated stuff, but I do think it's bad when they use iffy translations because now it's not changeable on the fly like the danbooru soft translations are.
Snesso, you're not the only one. I think there are even people who make hard translations for the purpose of uploading them to danbooru. To me, that's like taking an existing image, scaling or recompressing it a bit, and reuploading. We don't delete duplicates, but that doesn't mean you should set out to make more.
People even seem to take the translations on this very page, hardprint them onto the image (usually in an ugly font), then upload the translated image. If that's not pointless I don't know what is.
If we all adopted an image format that allowed for notes similar to danbooru's, the yes, hard translations would be pointless. However, this isn't the case. If someone (let's call him Steve) saves a copy of an image he (obviously) doesn't get the notes with it. If the meaning of the text matters to Steve, he has to devise some means to save the English text in addition to the image itself. Arguably, the most convenient and foolproof way to do this, is to photoshop/gimp/mspaint the text into the image. Rather than requiring every other person like Steve to do the same thing, he feels generous enough to upload/tag/parent his hard translation here for others to use.
Granted, this rigmarole is suboptimal, but only because we're using images to store text information -- which is terrible to begin with.
surasshu said: People even seem to take the translations on this very page, hardprint them onto the image (usually in an ugly font), then upload the translated image. If that's not pointless I don't know what is.
I know for the fact that this happens, because I've seen my own soft translations taken the day later and released as hard translations on a image board, which somebody ends up finding and re-posting here.
I really don't think this is a bad thing, so long as people make the hard translation the child post of the original. As sillycon said, when you save an image, you probably want to take the translation with it. Until we find a way to do this, this remains the best option.
What you should do is make those weird 'select in IE' type pictures - have the normal picture be default, then show the translated version on selection!