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New talk archive template

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You can see it at the top left. The archive sections are now collapsible and the template is much smaller. Please let me know if you have any questions. ···日本穣 · 投稿 · Talk to Nihonjoe · Join WP Japan! 07:25, 2 March 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Translation from ja:WP

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I am looking at Nihon Shoki: there is a template at the top that says, "This article may be expanded with text translated from the corresponding article in Japanese." Well, in a sense, one cannot argue with this. But it is true of every article on a Japanese topic, that the ja:WP article is a good place to look (assuming you can read Japanese) for more information; does this template really serve a useful purpose?

Then I view the "translation instructions", which begin: "Google's machine translation is a useful starting point for translations." This is a horrendous idea. If you are relying on the semi-gibberish MT produces from Japanese, you are simply not in a position to help. This at least should be instantly deleted. Perhaps the template is a generic one: if you are looking at du:WP, the output of MT may even be useful, since Dutch grammar is a shadow of English grammar, and a shadow of a shadow may be a useful start, but this is simply not true for unrelated languages. Imaginatorium (talk) 18:58, 3 March 2016 (UTC)[reply]

I would change it to "...can be a useful starting point..." because it can be, on occasion. ···日本穣 · 投稿 · Talk to Nihonjoe · Join WP Japan! 19:01, 3 March 2016 (UTC)[reply]
I agree with Imaginatorium from the view point of being able to verify information gained from the machine translation.
If we already have an English stub article, then an editor with no Japanese-language ability can read in English what the basic topic of the article is. From that starting point, if there are English sources for the topic, then they can expand the article without needing to look at the Japanese wiki article (although granted it may help by providing some search terms). If that editor can't find English sources and relies upon a machine translation of the Japanese article, they will still not be in a position to expand the English article because the editor will not have the ability to read the Japanese sources (if the article is sourced, which most are not). So in practice, the Japanese article will only be useful to an editor with the ability to read Japanese who can then use the article as a starting point to find their own sources, since most of the contents will be unsourced.
If the goal is to just get the article expanded (without caring about verifying the details), then and only then is a machine translation useful. AtHomeIn神戸 (talk) 01:14, 4 March 2016 (UTC)[reply]
MT can under certain circumstances be a useful tool, but we should never encourage people to use it to translate articles. Curly Turkey 🍁 ¡gobble! 01:35, 4 March 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Disability demographics

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I'm working on Draft:Disability in Japan, I have many sources for various aspects of disability but for the demographics of disability I'm struggling to find authoritative statistics from later than 1998 - which predates many legislative and policy changes about disability related issues. I'd appreciate it if someone here might be able to find more recent population statistics about disability - I am unfortunately limited to searching only English sources. Thanks Roger (Dodger67) (talk) 15:28, 29 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

@Dodger67: You may be able to find things here: ja:障害者. ···日本穣 · 投稿 · Talk to Nihonjoe · Join WP Japan! 07:32, 2 March 2016 (UTC)[reply]
@Nihonjoe: Thanks, but unfortunately I can't read Japanese, that's why I'm asking for assistance here. Roger (Dodger67) (talk) 16:44, 2 March 2016 (UTC)[reply]
@Dodger67: Quick! Learn the language! ···日本穣 · 投稿 · Talk to Nihonjoe · Join WP Japan! 19:47, 2 March 2016 (UTC)[reply]
Thanks for nothing! Bye. Roger (Dodger67) (talk) 18:32, 4 March 2016 (UTC)[reply]
I'll look at it and see what I can do when I have some time. Keep buggin me about it. ···日本穣 · 投稿 · Talk to Nihonjoe · Join WP Japan! 18:40, 4 March 2016 (UTC)[reply]
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These are all of the Japan-related portals on Wikipedia:

I see a distinct lack of non-popular culture portals. What suggestions do you all have for possible new portals? There should be a fair number of articles for the portal so it will have a decent amount of content, so a broader topic is good. I know how to make portals (I've made three), so that won't be a problem. I can show you how to do it, if you want help, too. ···日本穣 · 投稿 · Talk to Nihonjoe · Join WP Japan! 01:36, 17 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

To get things started, I've seen thinks like Portal:Fauna of Japan or Portal:Flora of Japan for other countries. Perhaps a Portal:Prefectures of Japan or Portal:Japan in World War II or Portal:History of Japan. Maybe Portal:Cuisine of Japan or Portal:Trains in Japan? Just a few thoughts. ···日本穣 · 投稿 · Talk to Nihonjoe · Join WP Japan! 01:39, 17 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]
Looks like these portals need work and have only been partially created:
So, in addition to those four. ···日本穣 · 投稿 · Talk to Nihonjoe · Join WP Japan! 01:48, 17 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]
Alas non-popular culture ... isn't popular.
Might Portal:Kansai be popular? But this is just a very tentative su-guess-tion. (I don't live in Kansai, which I visit rarely, though enjoyably.) -- Hoary (talk) 09:17, 21 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]
@Hoary: I could see regional portals being useful: Kansai, Tohoku, etc. ···日本穣 · 投稿 · Talk to Nihonjoe · Join WP Japan! 08:58, 23 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]
How about Portal:Japanese Politics (Portal:Politics of Japan)? There is at least one election coming up this year which may generate some interest in readers. I would be happy to work on the Kansai portal but, to be honest, what does it actually involve? I looked at the Osaka one, which appears to have been edited only 20 times in the last decade. Are they supposed to be updated more often? I know this is not the place to be asking such basic questions. AtHomeIn神戸 (talk) 00:40, 23 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]
@Athomeinkobe: The main portal page, once created, is generally not edited very often. It involves collecting a list of articles and quality images which would fit under the topic, and then sorting them into various categories (biographies, and so on). Gathering dates is good so events that happened on a particular day or in a particular month can be put into a set of calendar pages. It takes a fair bit of time to build one, but they can be built so they don't require a lot of maintenance. ···日本穣 · 投稿 · Talk to Nihonjoe · Join WP Japan! 08:58, 23 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]
On the French Wikipedia, we decided to create portals for all the prefectures (it took a bit less than a month for 2 contributors to do it), but also for the main cities (Tokyo, Kyoto, Osaka ; Yokohama and Nagoya were also considered). We also also have a portal for the History of Japan, and one sub-portal for the 1868-1945 era. Japanese cuisine also has its own portal. All of them can be found there. And yes, properly built, they don't require a lot of maintenance. XIIIfromTOKYO (talk) 12:29, 24 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]
It really depends on how the portal is built. I made the speculative fiction and Studio Ghibli portals here. The first is really complicated, with a lot of randomized content, and the second is far less complicated. ···日本穣 · 投稿 · Talk to Nihonjoe · Join WP Japan! 01:04, 26 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]
I'm sorry I missed the ping. So if it is done properly in the first place it doesn't need to be looked at often. Sounds like something to do as a long-term project and tinker with in draft space before finally making it live. AtHomeIn神戸 (talk) 01:11, 29 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Poll

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So, of the portals listed below, which one should we do first? This is a vote, so feel free to list them in order of preference (just use the number for each).

  1. Portal:Ainu (partially created)
  2. Portal:Cuisine of Japan
  3. Portal:Fauna of Japan
  4. Portal:Flora of Japan
  5. Portal:History of Japan
  6. Portal:History of Japan, 1868–1945
  7. Portal:Japan in World War II
  8. Portal:Kansai
  9. Portal:Politics of Japan (or Portal:Japanese Politics or Portal:Politics in Japan)
  10. Portal:Prefectures of Japan
  11. Portal:Prehistory of Asia (partially created, would involve a lot of other projects)
  12. Portal:Ryukyu (partially created)
  13. Portal:Sony (partially created)
  14. Portal:Trains in Japan

Let's figure this out! ···日本穣 · 投稿 · Talk to Nihonjoe · Join WP Japan! 20:00, 2 March 2016 (UTC)[reply]

IPA transliterations for a standard Japanese dialect

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Could someone more familiar with Japanese IPA double-check my transliterations? the WP:IPA for Japanese is a little unclear on r and pitch tones, so I figured I should get a second opinion.

Thanks! --Prosperosity (talk) 04:45, 19 March 2016 (UTC)[reply]

(Comment) I wonder what these are for? I am all in favour of using IPA to represent pronunciation, where it helps: for example in languages with no phonetic representation (French, Hungarian,...), or regional variations in English pronunciation. But for Japanese, you have to be either a real real phonetics expert for the IPA to be more helpful than Hepburn romanisation, or a Japanese speaker who can work it out backwards. In a dictionary, this would be a good addition for completeness' sake, but I wonder how it helps in WP? In particular a number of these expressions are katakana attempts at representing English words, and I think there will be huge variation in individual speakers' pronunciations. A bit like asking for a narrow IPA representation of the English (as in England) pronunciation of "Français" or "merci beaucoup". Further, if you are really describing the word in general, the representation should be phonemic, not phonetic, because of free variation. I recall an incident in Japanese evening classes in London, decades ago: this elderly gentleman was going to two different teachers, and couldn't understand variation in the pronunciation of です. "Why", he asked, "does the other teacher say /desu/ and you say /des/. Which is correct?" And Taya-san replied "Yes, です is correct." She could not hear the phonetic difference, and could not understand the question. Imaginatorium (talk) 06:27, 19 March 2016 (UTC)[reply]
As someone who deals with product titles, I've been wondering if adding IPA to supplement Hepburn readings might greatly benefit article titles. A song title like "Sweet 19 Blues", even though it is not presented in katakana would never be pronounced in a sentence as its English reading, /swi:t 'nainti:n blu:z/, as Chinese speakers might, and instead would say /sɯi:to nainti:n buɺu:su/. Adding in a Japanese IPA pronunciation would be appropriate for "Sweet 19 Blues", however adding katakana or a romaji reading would not, as the original script was not in this style. For the titles in Japanese, there's enough difference between Hepburn romaji and phonemic IPA that having both systems there could only benefit readers. I know personally that phonemic IPA had helped me with Korean words, where official romanisation has not.
As I see it, asking this question is less asking English people how they pronounce "merci beaucoup", but more asking them how they'd pronounce "pastiche" or "Mexico", as these are words that are assimilated into the general vocabulary of English. The online accent dictionaries for Japanese even point to specific pitch accents on different loan words in standard accents, so I don't know if it's appropriate to think of an entire vocabulary set of a language in terms of its source language, because of how wide-spread these differently pronounced versions of the same words are.
As you said, phonetic transcriptions, as opposed to phonemic, would be problematic as we'd get into dialectic and idiolectic issues, but we already have a set of broad IPA phonemes that represent Japanese words differently to Hepburn, otherwise why would Help:IPA for Japanese exist?
For your story, just because a native speaker can't actively describe the difference between two sounds (I know I'm a little deaf on /j/ vs. /ʎ/), doesn't mean a mispronunciation would cause problems to listeners. I remember one time when my teacher asked what my classmate's thesis topic was on, she replied tabunka. She'd meant 多文化 (multiculturalism), but my teacher heard 多分か… (umm maybe...). The difference between these two could be seen in IPA, but not in Hepburn. --Prosperosity (talk) 12:24, 19 March 2016 (UTC)[reply]
The problem I have with IPA is that 99% of English-speakers find it completely useless. It's really only taught in linguistics classes, so linguists know it, but the rest of every doesn't use it at all. I've taken a class where we learned it (a linguistics class, in fact), but I never used it outside that class so it's long forgotten now. ···日本穣 · 投稿 · Talk to Nihonjoe · Join WP Japan! 03:24, 20 March 2016 (UTC)[reply]
I would take issue with this, slightly: "99% of American speakers", possibly. But for European languages, IPA is the only show in town, and I think general awareness of IPA is much higher than you suggest. The problem is that whereas for French, German, etc, most of the vowels in particular are easy to remember variants on a-e-i-o-u-(y), Japanese in IPA is full of unfamiliar things like ɯ and devoicing marks. But my basic point was that Hepburn is a systematic, phonemic representation, which is adequate for just about all encyclopedic purposes. Imaginatorium (talk) 04:44, 20 March 2016 (UTC)[reply]
(Response to Prosperity) You say, "adding IPA to supplement Hepburn readings", but I cannot imagine quite who this would help, in general. Of course "IPA is different from Hepburn", but (except for showing pitch accent) it is almost precisely isomorphic. You could possibly produce a slightly more accurate version of your list above by a series of regexp replacements on the Hepburn -- for example, you would notice 'bokutohana', where you forgot to replace the 'u' by the "w-thingy". Then about these pseudo-English titles: well, I really did mean "merci beaucoup", and not assimilated loanwords like "pastiche", which really do have their own pronunciations in Englishes. Precisely because speakers are trying to pronounce a foreign language, their pronunciation is simply too variable for IPA to help. For example, in ゴー・トゥ・ザ・フューチャー the second word is an attempt to reproduce English "to", so should probably be Japanese pronunciation: [tɯ], (no 's' and no long vowel mark?). But individual speakers' abilities vary enormously, and some will no doubt approach a rounded (or "uncompressed"?) 'u' vowel. Again, final consonants ('t' in particular) are variously represented: ナイト and サンセット in your examples, one with a doubled "tto" the other just "to". I think that different speakers will make different degrees of proximity to a simple final 't'. I just don't see that there is a clearly identifiable pronunciation to be represented. Perhaps it would be best if you pick one or two actual examples where you think IPA would really help, and we can discuss them.
Finally, I didn't explain my story very carefully: the point is that voiced and voiceless final 'u' vowels are largely in free variation, and the teacher (Taya-san she was always called) simply could not hear what the problem is. In your list you have shown some with devoicing marks, others without, but I wonder if this can really be supported? Imaginatorium (talk) 05:42, 20 March 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Help finding sources?

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Can anyone help find sources for the article for Magic Michael Lam? It was up for speedy deletion but there was just enough of an assertion of notability to where he could pass speedy criteria. There isn't much coverage for him at all in English and none of it can be used to establish notability on here since it's mostly e-commerce sites and various forum mentions. Since he's from Hong Kong and is primarily active in China and Japanese, I figured that coverage would likely be in something other than English. I also posted at WP:CHINA asking for help finding sources. (so this is cross pasted from there) I tried searching using the characters in the article, but I couldn't find much since I'm not entirely sure if it's correct and also because the search predominantly brings up a psychologist by the same name. Refining it would require more than just a cut/paste and Google Translate.

I'm going to nominate this for deletion but I'd like for this article to have a fighting chance if there are other sources out there. Tokyogirl79 (｡◕‿◕｡) 06:33, 21 March 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Sociology of current Japanophilia

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The article "Japanophile" has a section on non-Japanese people of the present day who are interested in, or identify themselves as interested in, or who are identified as others as interested in, manga, anime and so forth. Part of this is sourced to a rambling personal essay in a fansite, part to an unpublished MA thesis -- and nothing that I bothered to look at that was much better. And it's about fandom, or labels for the fandom, or stigmatization via labels for the fandom. All pretty bad. My first inclination is to delete this stuff; but I have a hunch that there's meat for a sociological study here, and that better material is likely to exist. Is there a sociologist in the house? -- Hoary (talk) 13:59, 21 March 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Feel free to move it to the talk page for now so people can work on it until it's ready to be included. Those sources are not reliable in the least. ···日本穣 · 投稿 · Talk to Nihonjoe · Join WP Japan! 22:41, 21 March 2016 (UTC)[reply]

requested article

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Can we get a translation of https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E5%A4%A7%E8%A5%BF%E3%83%A9%E3%82%A4%E3%82%AA%E3%83%B3 ? Thanks!--Kintetsubuffalo (talk) 08:06, 25 March 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Like so many ja:WP articles, it's unsourced. What purpose would it serve? -- Hoary (talk) 23:02, 27 March 2016 (UTC)[reply]

遠浦帰帆

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I see sources that give the pronunciation of 「遠浦帰帆」 as both おんぽきはん、えんぽきはん、and ゑんぽきはん. The first seems most common in a plain Google search, but doesn't appear at all in a Google Books search. ja-wp gives おんぽきはん, and I suspect that's why it is so common in search results, but I don't want to give that based on my suspicions. Is there anyone who knows (or can find out) for sure what pronunciation (romanization) is correct (or at least most appropriate)? Curly Turkey 🍁 ¡gobble! 14:51, 27 March 2016 (UTC)[reply]

I would go with "enpo kihan" based on the quality of the sources. えんぽきはん comes up not only with more hits [1] than おんぽきはん [2], but the hits include the Kyoto National Museum and other academic sources. Onpo kihan only comes up with websites by individuals, etc. Michitaro (talk) 23:27, 27 March 2016 (UTC)[reply]
Right. I think I'll change it on the ja-wp page, too. Curly Turkey 🍁 ¡gobble! 02:38, 28 March 2016 (UTC)[reply]
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