*Is this.. :)

I think the initial "Is" may be omitted in casual, plain speech. Maybe around 2% in actual usage.

One example from Google "This a recent photo? Hope it is, she looks so healthy here!"

I would suggest adding "Is this a recent photo?" as an alternative translation of the Japanese, and keeping this one with a not.

agreed. actually americans are all over it in casual speech, but I've never seen it before in written form.

(btw, should I worry about indices and what have ya when adding english translations to japanese or v.v.?)

> (btw, should I worry about indices and what have ya when
> adding english translations to japanese or v.v.?)

I wouldn't worry too much. If you add a new Japanese sentence, and you want it in WWWJDIC, then someone will need to add index data at some point. There's a semi-hidden page
http://tatoeba.org/sentence_annotations/
if you want to do it yourself. If you at least fill in the meaning field (points at English version of sentence) and the dictionary forms of all words in the sentence separated by spaces that will give me / Jim a place to start.

For example:
これは、最近の写真？
→ 此れ は 最近 乃 写真

The final version would probably be
此れ[01]{これ} は[01] 最近{最近の} 写真
but it's probably best to leave the technical stuff to the people who are used to it.

thank god I don't have to deal with this :P

one question (if it's not gonna bother you):

can't a 'custom built' parser do this automatically?

Not well enough to be worth the effort of setting one up.

Jim used ChaSen originally, back when he had ~200,000 odd sentences with no index information, but on the scale of a dozen or so sentences a week (if that) it is _so_ not practical.