@Assasinart posted:
where does one define that threshold to be moved from translation to troll?
We don't have a hard guideline for it because there's obviously no simple way to define it, but more importantly it hasn't really come up much in the discussions amongst the staff in the almost two years we've been up. It's just not a real issue.
I'm not a moderator so it's not my job to care or do anything about this stuff, but I'd personally say the threshold is somewhere around where the translation, as a whole, no longer has anything to do with the original - essentially this means rewrites that completely ignore the original text. Phrasing a translation in the format of a known meme like in the post just above is perfectly fine and legitimate. The chances are that the original there said something along the lines of "riajuu explode" which is a meme on its own - and even if that exactly weren't the case, the English text makes sense given the context.
The only real problem with localizing jokes and dropping in some memes to your translation is that a good chunk of the audience may be the kind of people that think leaving "baka" untranslated is completely fine and sometimes even preferable, so you might want to consider the potential response to your work. However, people's dislike of a particular translation has never been one of the criteria for us to delete it.