I get it, but also remember that “expertise” is relative. Maybe you’re not an ‘expert’ in comparison to certain Japanese scholars who are the leading figures in their field, but in comparison to everyone here, you are the expert because you can read fójiào hànyǔ 佛教漢語. And that matters.
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If we do decide to implement this plug-in, the tags that might be used would benefit from careful consideration, with an aim of being as uncontroversial as possible.
eg @cdpatton translator vs @cdpatton super-expert.
… I’m wondering why this thread suddenly ran out of puff.
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I think this, like many many things, were in need of a management committee 
I would love to see a translator badge. I’m not sure of the interplay between groups and badges, but perhaps there should be a translator group if that could facilitate communication between translators. On the other hand a translator group would mean anyone could summon them all by including @translators, which might not be a good thing.
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Is it possible or worthwhile making that translator badge more specific like translator—Russian etc.? Also, there is quite a bit of a difference between translating into some contemporary language from the existing English translations on suttacentral and translating from Pali, Sanskrit, Tibetan, or Chinese. The latter is significantly harder and requires “next level” scholarship.
We could also fine tune a generic expert category to say Comparative Studies Expert or Nikaya-Agama Expert etc. I am just throwing some random categories out there but nuances and specifics are going to be important.
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I can see how being labeled expert could have a variety of mental effects on both the labeled person and everyone else. Perhaps a term like specialist might tone that down a bit. There are all levels of badges for people here like aficionado and enthusiast.
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Sounds like it could be a breeding ground for self view and conceit; encouraging concern for building up ones reputation 
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That’s fine. I’ll just do what I do these days, which is pop in to add to the discussion when I think an angle is being left out. I suppose I could be considered competent at reading Buddhist Chinese, but it’s not like I’m always right or that anyone can know who’s right sometimes. That’s the nature of ancient languages.
The main issue for me is a personal and professional one, which is that I need to remain as unbiased as possible as a translator, so I purposely avoid things that would be detrimental to that. It’s a very conscious decision.
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Thanks for making that point. I can now see that your position is a bit different from eg @Sujato’s.
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I think translator is quite neutral. It’s just a fact. Someone is either a translator for SC or not.
I had assumed that we would only be marking people who translated from root languages. So the badge would be Pali Translator, etc.
We could also havebadges like En -> De to indicate people translating from any modern language to another if that is needed.
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I’m not keen on a general ‘expert’ badge, which was how I read this topic a year ago.
However, I quite like the idea of highlighting our translators and even making and @translator group.
This is not an arbitrary assignment of ‘expertise’, rather, a way of recognising their contribution of skill to the overall site.
Maybe we have other ‘skillsets’ we would like to recognise in the same way, such as our programmers/dev-team.
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