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This is an announcement rather than a question, but feel free to ask and comment through questions or comments.

The tag is was overly broad. We decided to get rid of it and agreed on a process to do so, and now the process is very near its end. At the moment there are 155 questions with this tag, and they all ask for translations from English to Latin.

I made a synonym for and merged the two tags. This effectively means that the former tag has now been automatically replaced with the latter one in all those 155 questions. If you attempt to add the old tag to a question, it will be converted automatically. In effect, the tag is no more. The only thing left to decide is whether we want to ban the plain so that everyone needs to pick something more specific, but that is only a minor detail and we can see how things go after the present change.

The synonym was chosen simply because it is the most common kind of translation we have, and this final retagging of 155 questions happens silently with a couple of clicks without bumping any posts to the front page.

We currently have a couple of different kinds of translation tags:

If you feel that a more specific translation tag is needed for whatever purpose, feel free to create one. If it turns out to be superfluous, we can easily synonymize or even merge it to something else, so no harm is done. Please consider including the word "translation" in the tag name so that it shows up when you type that word in the tag search box. The most useful thing we could have is more language tags like translations from French to Latin if there ever are questions of that kind. Don't worry about creating small tags; we can lump tags together and unlump them later if they grow.

I might have overlooked some questions, so a few might have been wrongly retagged. But we have some tagging errors anyway, so it is not a big deal. If you see any badly tagged questions, go ahead and edit them or raise a flag or bring it up in our chat or ask a meta question.

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I prefer leaving as a synonym, as that helps expose the other tags more readily to new community members. Even as someone who posts more regularly, it helps me find relevant tags if I've forgotten them.

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  • It's only a synonym for one of the many translation tags. Do you think the visibility as a benefit will outweigh the confusion? I can imagine a new user posting a translation question from Latin to English, choosing the simplest tag "translation" and ending up with the tag "english-to-latin-translation". I hope that mistake is hard enough to make. I don't have a clear opinion on this. – Joonas Ilmavirta♦ Dec 4 '20 at 15:07
  • Hmm... I may be thinking of tag suggestions that show when you attempt to add translation as a tag. I still feel it's probably safe since English to Latin is still the most common, and we can always fix it if it's the reverse. – Adam Dec 4 '20 at 15:24
  • I see. If you type "translation" in the box, it will show all tags containing that string. (I often search for "ntoe" to find "latin-to-english-translation".) So if we were to remove that particular tag, it would still show the most likely tags. Actually, if you type that now, the first suggestion is "english-to-latin-translation", mentioning that it's also known as "translation". With the tag "translation" completely removed, you would still get the same suggestion but not the mention of a synonym. How does the tag adding interface feel if you play with it now? – Joonas Ilmavirta♦ Dec 4 '20 at 15:37
  • It's fairly intuitive, although it won't stop someone from actually adding the tag if they don't notice that it's a synonym. If we remove it entirely as a tag, what happens if someone tries to add it anyway? – Adam Dec 4 '20 at 20:53
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    @Adam: If we ban the tag, I believe you will be unable to add it: you'll get an error message of sorts. – Cerberus♦ Dec 5 '20 at 0:30
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    @Cerberus I think that should happen. I can add the blacklisted "grammar" to a question, but I'm not sure what happens if I try to post it. At any rate, no major harm should be done if someone tries to add it. It's not unusual for a question to need retagging anyway. – Joonas Ilmavirta♦ Dec 5 '20 at 15:28

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