You literally only need the /dp/6272839398474/ portion. Everything else before or after can be cut out.
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The blurbs toggle is now sticky. So if you change it to Japanese, it will stay Japanese 
Yeah @omk3 is right. Amazon links get stupidly long. I should handle them better, thanks for the note.
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For items like that, just use the feedback button to request the blurbs to be changed to individual volumes. I’ve already done that in this case.
I’m happy to make that process more streamlined if we find it’s super common, just think it’s probably better to default to series blurb as it’s probably more manageable 
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Thanks! And now I’m faced with another question: What to do with blurbs that I feel are way too spoilery? More like full summaries than blurbs…
For some I’ve just cut off some parts, but for others this doesn’t make sense unless I also edit the text. If I edit the text, it’s not purely a publisher’s blurb any more…
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I am camp “Machine translation is better than nothing” and I always have the option of not reading the Eng version if I don’t like machine translation. I’d rather give people more options than fewer. More convenient for peopel to have the translation on site rather than opening deepl and copy/pasting.
You could probably get away with the free version even. There is a limit, but since the translations are a 1 time thing and then just as new books get added, most months you’ll probably not even hit the limit. (my assumption. 500.000 characters is like 2 本好き volumes 
)
Yes please, or even something like “translated by deepL” because there is a qualitiy difference between deepl and - let’s say - google.
Small caveat: How do you make sure you won’t be held liable if someone copies a copyrighted summary from somewhere? Will there be a disclaimer or how does that work? Official summaries should be fine as it is in the interest of the publisher but let’s say someone yoinks something from a book review site, etc.?
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I agree. I must say I’m struggling to see why people are opposed to this 
. If you have a strong dislike for machine translation, you can simply ignore it? It’d be a pretty big boon for most people, especially beginners. I’m suspicious we won’t get a good portion of these blurbs filled out, we have a lot of books!
Not really concerned and it’s not really different than a user review? If you get a takedown request for some copyrighted content, then we simply remove it.
Could always add a spoiler tag 
. In all honesty, I think we should generally abide by the publisher blurb. Open to other’s thoughts on the matter.
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Having the machine translated blurbs could discourage people from submitting better or official English blurbs. What about a middle ground where there’s a “show translation” button underneath the native blurb which shows the (cached) translation? This might be better anyway since some people may want a translation of the Japanese version even when there’s an official English publisher version.
Ultimately you should just do what you feel is best and ignore us if needed though.
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After reading this, I have to agree and changed my vote over.
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An “improve this translation” button for MTL’d descriptions could negate this concern. Most people using the site aren’t going to contribute that kind of information anyway, and I doubt it would discourage users that are willing to put in time and effort to improve the site.
You could argue that MTL’d descriptions would encourage people to add official translations, because apparently people feel really strongly about not using it. 
Agree with all of this. Unless the people against MTL are offering to source official translations for (or translate themselves) descriptions of the 10k+ books on the site, what’s the alternative? Because “nothing” isn’t particularly helpful…
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The problem is what to do when there are no official blurbs in English (so when a book hasn’t been translated into English, which is most of the cases really).
In this case, the options are:
- machine translation
- machine translation after approval (whose? can’t be one person)
- user translation (would probably still need approval)
user original blurb(we said we prefer sticking to publisher blurbs)- nothing at all
There are no guarantees that user translation will be better than machine translation, to be honest. Given the above I tend to think it’s okay to use machine translation as long as it’s clearly labelled as such, possibly with a disclaimer that it may contain errors (although that’s true for any blurb really). When people edit, the label is changed to “edited machine translation”. If a book does get officially translated, we can exchange the automatic translation, edited or not, for the English language publisher’s blurb.
TLDR: If the alternative is nothing at all, I too tend to agree that clearly labelled automatic translation may be preferable.
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Since pretty much every physical book has a blurb on the back cover (I’ve seen some manga that don’t, e.g. the CLAMP Premium Collection edition of xxxHOLiC—and presumably the other series with such an edition, that’s just the only one I’ve got), tbh I don’t see why individual volumes can’t have those blurbs on their page. Make the first vol blurb the series blurb automatically, though the series can get their own separate one on a case-by-case basis.
If people are that worried about spoilers for later volumes… maybe blurbs could be made hideable? Have a user setting for whether they’re hidden or shown by default?
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Is this the primary reason people are voting against machine translation? If that’s the case, I think clear call to actions like a preamble ‘(Machine Translation - needs review)’, would address those concerns for the most part? Or something like @bibliothecary’s button, but I’m more inclined to keep it simple.
This is my thought with the ‘translator’ field in the blurb entry, but I could give more description on that in the form.
TBH, this seems to be a relatively standard thing. For instance, on MAL I just saw a summary which had [MAL rewrite] or something like that at the end.
TBF, this may end up happening haha. I suspect that the people here are capable of reading Japanese blurbs anyway, so this poll isn’t entirely representative. However, while I may not abide by the result of the poll, it nonetheless prompts a good discussion to have and I will try to make a reasonable compromise for everyone.
This is really more of a practicality thing than a philosophical thing. We have over 70,000 books on platform and only a tiny set of dedicated users willing to help out with blurbs.
We could perhaps, default to the series blurb if there is no individual blurb, but allow you to add individual blurb. I just didn’t want to handle that interface complexity on the first go
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For pre-populating: I realize there are probably many books this wouldn’t apply for, but considering many books here already link to Myanimelist or Anilist, Is there a reason English blurbs can’t be auto-sourced/pre-filled from one or both of those, if there isn’t an English Amazon one already?
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There needs to be a visual cue when there’s no blurb. Right now if you are over in Japanese, you don’t know if EN exists until you click it.
Something like doing a disabled=“true” on the button for example. While I know this doesn’t really work very well as it won’t provide the message that you can add one, maybe that message can be put with a tooltip over the disabled button.
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Ok! Individual books will start having their Japanese blurbs auto populated, beginning with the most popular. It’ll take a few days though. And, again, any blurbs already existing will not be overwritten
After that, I will try to get the rest of the series populated.
I’m not entirely sure how I feel about this. If anyone has advice or would like to chat about it, please dm me.
Agreed, I’m not entirely sure what’s best. Issue with opacity / disabled is that it might be slightly confused on which one you’ve selected if they’re both empty. Another alternative would be a small icon in the top left corner of the language button to indicate if it’s empty.
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Perhaps change the text from “EN” to “Add EN”; @Megumin
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So I don’t know if this has been discussed yet or not @brandon: for the Korean “series” with like 50+ books (i.e. the books that Yes24 is grouping into a series, even though they’re not actually), should we just manually request that book blurbs be separate for each book? Or are there plans to chop the series into individual books on Natively?
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There are no plans… so I guess manually requesting is the way to go
With regards to auto translation, I have now closed the poll. The ‘no machine translated’ did win with one vote. Even still, I do think I will go ahead and add machine translations with a ‘call to action’ text to review. See the bottom of the message for an example. It was very close and I really do think it’ll be a big value add for beginners, especially since we have around 6500 blurbs right now.
In general, I think we’ll need a guide on how to do these blurbs well, but i’m not entirely sure. If someone is wanting to lay out some guidelines on the blurbs, that’d be lovely… but I’m not entirely sure what’s right.
Regardless, i’m sure we’ll start to discover things we like & don’t like as more blurbs come in.
The machine translation process is all ready to go, but i’ll leave this message up for a day so people can respond
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I missed voting, so I guess I would have made it a tie in favour of machine translation I think the “DeepL Translation - needs review” disclaimer is all that’s really needed to offset any of the downsides compared to the huge accessibility upside of having even a low-quality English blurb available. For me, the purpose of the blurb is just to get a vague idea of if the content will interest me, so the bar for how accurate the translation needs to be in order to satisfy my needs is extremely low.
I’m curious though, how important is it that the English blurbs match the original? Say if the book has been translated and has an official English blurb already, but it doesn’t match the Japanese publisher’s blurb, would that be preferred to replace the DeepL translation with? Or should ‘reviewing’ the DeepL blurb only involve correcting it to be more faithful to the original?
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Personally, I’ve been adding the English blurbs regardless of whether they match the Korean blurb.
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