KudoZ: Should vote pro/non-pro options be eliminated?

Jessica Noyes wrote:
I had always thought that if a question is voted "non-pro", KudoZ points are not awarded to the person who answers.

Is that correct? If so, then I would vote to keep the distinction.

Samuel Murray wrote:



1. Remember, according to ProZ.com itself, "pro" is for "a question that is suitable for professional translators" (and if you click the question mark icon you'll see an explanation to the effect that "non-pro" is reserved for questions by mostly non-translators who are merely curious about something or do not ask the question because they want to use the answer in a translation job).

Katalin Horváth McClure wrote:

The site FAQ says this:
"Non-PRO questions are those that can be answered by any bilingual person without the aid of a dictionary. All other questions are PRO."
See here:
https://www.proz.com/faq/2905#2905

Katalin Horváth McClure wrote:

Samuel, I am curious to know where you saw that sort of definition.

The categorization has nothing to do with the asker or their intention, or their reason to post it. It only refers to the content of the question.

Natasha Ziada wrote:

I've always wondered about the 'any bilingual person' part in this definition - shouldn't that be 'any professional translator'? A lot of the Non-PRO questions I've encountered involved wordplay, cultural references, ambiguity or some other tricky aspect that made them perhaps not technically hard, but certainly challenging to answer.

Regardless of the nature of the questions, I'm not even sure why the FAQ would mention bilingual persons at all; this is a site for professional translators, who may or may not be bilingual, and 'merely' being bilingual and being able to answer language/translation related questions are two very different things.

Never mind the fact that trying to define 'bilingual' is similar to trying to define 'native': akin to opening a can of big, fat worms

Richard Purdom wrote:

Personally I'd like to see some entire kudoz language pairs classified as non-PRO.

I translate from Dutch and Portuguese into English.

The NL-ENG pair usually contains difficult questions that are answered with substantiation, grounds and references.

The PT-ENG pair, on the other hand, is a farce. Questions are generally asked by non-natives, answered by non-natives, the reason is often 'suggestion', nothing else, then non-natives select answers by other non-natives and even enter them in the glossary! Marking this glossary as non-PRO would be the fair thing to do.

writeaway wrote:

Askers already 'own' questions: it's no longer allowed to post a warning that the answer chosen is wrong, it is no longer possible for moderators to alter erroneous glossary entries,etc. Imo, muzzling colleagues 100% would also be detrimental to the site as a whole.

Robert Forstag wrote:



I initially noticed this same problem years ago, and it doesn’t look like the situation has improved greatly over time. Many of the answers, including those awarded points, simply do not pass muster as acceptable English. This also applies to many of the offerings of someone with a prominent position on the overall leader board who answers questions in that pair.

In sum, there are a lack of qualified native English speakers active in the POR-to-ENG pair in Kudoz. This would not be surprising for the translation of less widely spoken languages into English, but it is fairly startling for a language like Portuguese.

[Edited at 2019-05-02 18:29 GMT]