My instinct is to assume Help me understand the pronounced phrase? must be Off Topic (it's about a movie clip where the OP can't discern what's being said at a certain point).
If it's On Topic, what's to stop ELU being swamped with similar questions from non-native speakers? Or anyone who can't make out the words in an old movie without subtitles?
I haven't Close-Voted, because I don't know what reason to cite. Is there one, or am I just wrong?
I cannot see any way in which it could possibly fall within the site's current purview to act as a transcription service for random video clips, so I voted to close and put in a custom "we are not a transcription service" reason.
The question is supposedly about pronunciation, but it's not about what variations of pronunciation are available or how have the pronunciations developed and shifted over time or some other aspect. Basically, to my mind, the topic of "pronunciation" is about "How do you say"; "What did he say?" doesn't make the cut.
Also, the question is completely unhelpful to any other person besides the original asker. (Unless there's some sort of video-clip-search capability that I'm unaware of, and even then I don't see it getting any traffic here.)
This post was recently referred to in a comment on a similar kind of question, and since I hadn't answered then, I thought I would do so now.
The trouble with posted audio or video clips is that asking "What is this person saying?" is unlikely to be helpful to future visitors. Even if it were, it would be nearly impossible for future visitors to find. Also, asking what word a person is saying is not really to do with English Language & Usage so much as it is to do with listening comprehension, which could apply to any language.
I agree with phenry that our guidelines could be altered to make this clearer. I also think
I would have picked the "too localized" reason for this, but... it seems like it no longer exists. StackOverflow replaced it with more specific reasons to make the close reasons more useful, but I think in principle it's still a valid reason to close questions.
If this happens often enough, I suppose we could add a "we are not a transcription/translation service" to the close vote reasons. In the mean time, I would use "other".
Either way, it seems far afield from things that would be of interest to "linguists, etymologists, and serious English language enthusiasts" so I would have no compunctions about closing it. We could update the FAQ, but really - that's not meant to be all-inclusive about what you can and can't ask, is it?
This is why I get irked at the backasswards approach toward statutory interpretation that people have around here.
Pronunciation questions are explicitly on topic here. They are. They just are. Nowhere in the Help Center do we say that that does not include requests for help interpreting a word in an audio or video clip. A user could read every word of every help page—could do every single thing we ask new users to do—and see no indication anywhere that questions about identifying words in audio clips are off topic here. The very least we should do is give good-faith users who read the rules and make every effort to conscientiously follow them a fighting chance to get it right.
If someone wants to modify the guidelines to specify that questions about interpreting audio are off-topic, they'll have my support. Really! I have no great love for such questions, and they're much closer to ELL's core competencies than they are to ours. Let's do it today! But to ex post facto close-vote a question as "off-topic" just because one doesn't happen to "like" it, when the question itself clearly falls within the published guidelines, is not only wrong, it is rude, unhelpful to both new and longtime users, and, in my opinion, profoundly unethical.
FumbleFingers, this rant is not directed at you. Raising this question at Meta is absolutely the right way to handle this, and I applaud you for doing it. I'm just a bit on edge this week about the arbitrary and capricious way we apply our own guidelines. It's not fair, it makes it utterly impossible for even experienced users to figure out just what the hell they're supposed to be doing here, and—when aimed at non-fluent speakers of English, as it so often is—it can come really uncomfortably close to being racist. And I'm goddamned sick of it.
