I tried out the German translation a couple of month ago - it was so bad, that I switched back to English. Today, I tried it out again and I have to say, that the quality really improved. I don't know, whether our skritter gods did this and/or other users. However, there are still at least 20% of the entries, which are problematic. These are:
- missing translations;
- wrong translations;
- incomplete translations, which easily might lead to a wrong understanding.
I have started now to work on these items during my reviews and to correct or translate them. I do this very diligently, looking up in dictionaries, compare to the English entry etc. I am wondering, whether other users are also doing this and how many are around, who are willing to commit themselves to do some of this extra work, as it is quite time consuming. The positive effect is, that I already have encountered quite some characters / words, where I originally didn't grasp the real meaning (although my English is not so bad, as I live in Apac already for 15 years). Would be nice to get in contact with these people, so that we can agree on a standard method, dictionaries etc. in order to have high quality translations. I also would be interested to learn, what are suitable resources to translate idioms and chengyu's into German, as my dictionaries have only basic staff in and especially no detailed explanations.
Furthermore, if our skritter gods could give us an additional feature, which makes the work easier:
For those entries in German, where I am suspicious that they are incorrect or incomplete, I first check in Pleco, using their German dictionary (which also has a so-so quality) as well as the English dictionaries and the Chinese. It would be nice, if I could check during study in German also the original English entry and compare, whether the German is in line withj the original English version. This could be on the study page via another button or on the detailed pop-up window for this entry. Would that be possible? I could imagine, that other people for other languages are doing the same and this would also make their live easier.
Are you skritter guys also checking the corrections on other languages than English? I found some items, which were quite strange, e.g. half a page of description about the city of Luoyang, including number of inhabitants, history and so on or one entry, which was more than 50% in Chinese. If you would be interested, we could form a small community to guarantee a quality work and also check on changes, made by other users.

@Roland that's wonderful. Some time ago I tried using Skritter in Spanish and it was just too much of a pain to keep switching back and forth, so I stopped. If there was a way to compare English, Spanish, and Chinese definitions I think I would look at them much more.

I still rely on English because I use the Heisig keywords...I think the definitions are taken from HanDeDict? So maybe it would be nice to let it benefit from the corrections of Skritter users...

Idem here in Spanish.

Right now I have a big problem because I can remember Chinese hanzi from English definitions but not from Spanish definitions; I am worried about that because it means I need to learn again all my Chinese stuff from the beginning.

No, I do not like to start again, so, the idea from James would be nice.

@jlm2jlm2 just to be clear, it wasn't my idea, it's Roland's! ;)

As you know English it not my maternal language and perhaps I misunderstand Roland’s post; sorry Roland and thanks James.

@jlm2jlm2 - Don't worry about relearning your Chinese too much. Over time, the translation step will go away. Then it will be thinking in Chinese for Chinese.

I just recently started studying Spanish. All three languages are a jumbled mess right now.

In my head you would find:

gato = gato (No translation needed)
uno = one
conozco(sp?) = 认识

My brain started getting weird with just two language floating around in it. I am curious to see what chaos ensues after three are firmly entrenched in there.

Added: (REALLY WISH WE HAD AN EDIT FEATURE) I can understand why you would find it frustrating to have to use English to study Chinese, though.

@west316, it is not a real problem because now I am more confident with my English, but sometimes it is difficult for me to catch out the different between similar words and would be easier in Spanish; however, you are right, at the end, neither English nor Spanish, just Chinese.

On the other hand, I am sure you will learn Spanish before I Chinese.

@ jlm2jlm2 - Hahaha. It takes the average American roughly 4 to 6 months of intense study to learn Spanish. It takes us an average of a year and a half to two years to learn Mandarin. Spanish is so close to English that I imagine the numbers are similar for you.

I think your last statement is a safe bet. :)

加油！You will get there.

@west316 I think English is much harder for Spanish speakers than vice versa. But you're right, Chinese is much harder no matter where you're starting from...

Although my native language is German I also rely on English(en-zh) due to the fact that I also wanted to improve my English skills. The result? I'm more fluent in English than ever!

At the moment, no we are not handling corrections for other languages, because none of us are fluent in these other languages. What we could do though is deputize users who are interested in handling corrections and generally improving the dictionaries for these other languages. We already have an interface for this on the site, which provides reference material from other dictionaries. If you're up to doing this I can set up you and anyone else to have access to this page. We would just need to give you an overview of the format we generally want and how to use the system. And if you'd like, we can add free time to your Skritter account for doing this work. If there are ways I could improve the corrections tool for you (we call it the baller), you can let me know and I'll work on it.

For Chinese, there are currently thousands of French and Italian corrections, and hundreds of Chinese and German ones. For Japanese there are a lot fewer, the largest group being a couple hundred Russian corrections. So with any source language, there's not an overwhelming amount of work to be done at the moment.

Email me at scott at skritter.com if you'd like to join up.

@scott you can sign me up for Spanish if you'd like

Scott, how many people do you need? Spanish here too.

I can use all the help I can get. Besides, I'm not a native.

Sure, you guys can check each others' work, make it all real good. There's plenty to do because our Spanish-Chinese dictionary is pretty minimal. I'll email you jlm2jlm2.

I will be glad to support James.

@jlm2jlm2 my email address is jww1066 (same as here) at gmail.com