status: https://faculty.washington.edu/kerim/nomic/cases/#3471
(This document is informational only and contains no game actions).
============================= CFJ 3471 =============================
Josh T has voted AGAINST on the decision on Proposal 7836.
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Caller: Murphy
Judge: G.
Judgement: FALSE
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History:
Called by Murphy: 17 Nov 2016
Assigned to G.: 05 Jan 2017
Judged FALSE by G.: 23 May 2017
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Caller's Evidence:
Josh T wrote:
> 以下の票を投ずる：
>
> > 7836+ ais523 1.0 Victory Elections
> 反対
>
> > 7837* ais523 1.0 Era Fix
> 白票
[Google Translate output for the above Japanese texts]
"I will cast the following votes"
"Opposite"
"A white paper"
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Judge's Arguments:
For a considerable time, CFJ 1460 has been the guiding principle for non-
English communications. Essentially, it states that, for an action message
to be effective, it cannot take unreasonable effort for a "typical Agoran"
to interpret it.
In the 14 years since that judgement, machine translation has become
increasingly available and ubiquitous. Therefore, as a first part, I find
that it does *not* take unreasonable effort to take a provided string
directed (without translation) at a single officer (e.g. a reply to a
vote message), and paste it into an online translator, any more than it is
unreasonable effort to look up a synonym in a dictionary.
(If the context is entirely contained in the foreign language; e.g.
"I vote XXX on proposal YYY" is written as its own message and not in reply
to a thread, it *is* in fact unreasonable effort, as it requires each
officer to determine out of context whether the message is directed at
them or not. That was the case in CFJ 1460, but not here).
However, once placed in the translator, one must look at the exact text
(in English, matching the language of the rules) and determine if it is
clear and unambiguous. Here, the standard is not "effort" but our
standards of whether a statement (in English) is clear enough to cause
an action, a frequent subject of court cases.
This is the approach taken here.
For both CFJ 3471 and 3472, the message in question was prefaces with:
以下の票を投ずる
Using google, this directly translates to "I will cast the following
votes". While the "will cast" is a little off in grammar, I find this
clear enough.
CFJ 3471: 反対 yields "opposite". While this may be considered "against",
it may also be read as "a different vote than someone else". I think
this is sufficiently unclear to fail. I judge FALSE on 3471.
CFJ 3472: 白票 yields "a white paper". This is clearly not a valid vote.
I judge 3472 FALSE.
Now, it's possible that the above terms have some colloquial meaning or
secondary synonym not shown by the machine translator that would map to
valid votes on these proposals. However, the standard must be that the
officer (or other player) can interpret these unambiguously without said
information, so supplying that context is outside the content of these
messages.
Addendum: this portion of the argument is also proof against certain types
of scams, e.g. submitting a message in a foreign language that attempts
to do something bad Without Objection, in the hope it prevents people
from objecting. That would not clearly indicate the message contents beyond
unreasonable effort (as it requires everyone interpret the message in order to
understand the type of public message and response required).
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