Why should somebody consult an online translation service before asking here?

Question

Community recently downvoted and closed this question as off topic:

How do you say "He was looking for you" in German?

The given canned close reason "requests for proofreading, spell checking or translations of individual texts are off topic" does not fit here, because there neither is such an individual text nor is there anything in that question that could be "narrowed further down". I believe it was more of a phrase request that we previously had decided to be on topic.

In a highly upvoted comment it said in addition:

Did you try to use an online translator? What did it say? Do you have further problems with this translation attempt?

It is not the first time that we could read such a request for using an online translation service but in this case it appears as if it was the only thing what is missing.

Was this really the only reason for closing this question as off topic? What would make the result of such a machine translation so valuable here?

If not, what else do you think is missing to this question to make it on topic? What should have been said to help making this question or similar future questions better?

Answer 1

Why should somebody consult an online translation service before asking here?

I think that consulting an automatic translation services should never be mandatory and given their inevitable shortcomings, I would not recommend them either in most cases. Consulting such a service can be one way of prior research in some cases, but that’s about it.

Was this really the only reason for closing this question as off topic?

Let’s walk through this scheme:

1. What does the question ask for? – translation
2. Which direction? – to German
3. Is the meaning of the foreign words clear? – yes
4. Is the question about a single world, idiom or fixed phrase? – I can see why this might be debatable, but I would say yes, it is. In particular, some of the answers (e.g., “Y wollte etwas von Dir.”) would not come up when translating piece by piece.
5. Does the asker explain why a dictionary did not help? – no
6. Do you expect that a simple look-up in any dictionary suffices to answer the question? – Again, I can understand why this is debatable: I can imagine that a dictionary contains this phrase. However, I consulted a few dictionaries and found nothing, so: no
7. Is the question clear? – yes. More details would help us to provide a more helpful answer to the asker, but it is clear what is a good answer to this question.

Answer 2

A principle in most SE-sites is "Show your own effort!" I think this principle rules for German SE, too. And in this sense, it is not too much to ask to use an online translator¹, to look if it answers the question and (only) if it does not then to ask, especially what is furthermore unclear.

I think, most people here are glad to help but no one wants to be exploited. I think the question mentioned above can be answered with the help of an online tranlator but I also understand that nevertheless it will remain some finer points, e. g. using in formal or colloquial way and so on.

So for me, in deed this question only lacks the "own effort" and that's why I wrote the comment mentioned above.

^{1: Like Google tranlslator, DeepL and so on.}