Should we translate non-English questions?

Question

Sometimes, users will post questions in a language other than English. What should we do about such posts? Should we try and translate with automatic translators? Should we close as unclear? Something else?

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_{Please note that this is a discussion post. This isn't a new policy, at least not yet. Mods don't get to decide policy, the community does. So if people disagree with my answer below, by all means downvote it and please post your own, competing answers arguing your position.}

Answer 1

Proposed policy:

• If the edited question is a good question and in English then there should be no justification for closing it
• Machine translations made by anyone other than the OP should be treated as vandalism and reverted
• If you are in a position to clarify the wording of a question then please do (translations included)

IE it's acceptable to revert a third party machine translation and then vote to close. It's also acceptable to translate a question if you can.

I'm not even sure this is a change in existing policy so much as a clarification.

Rationale

Why not immediately close the edited question?

We should never care about previous versions when voting on a question or voting to close. A basic principle of why SE has the edit option in the first place is that improvements are encouraged. The only exception may be chameleon questions

The quality of english we get here sometimes is pretty awful and there have been times when questions use only english words but are still not "english". I see no good reason why cleaning up such questions would be any different to accurately translating a non-english question.

Why not allow machine translations?

They are usually bad english and very unreliable. If you knew what my father in law accidentally said to me before the wedding you'd never trust one again! I've still not had the courage to explain to him what that little electronic voice really said.

Machine translations should be discouraged if you cannot verify the translation has preserved the original meaning. If you can confirm the original meaning has been preserved then why did you use the machine translator?

Translating a question from its original wording and leaving it in bad english isn't an improvement! Translating a question without personally understanding what the OP was trying to ask should always be treated as a bad edit. The classification of "vandalism" might be a bit harsh here, but reverting it should be the right action.

Why an exception for OP's translating their own question?

If the OP chooses to use a machine translation that's a different matter. They might have enough english knowledge to understand the translation was close enough without enough english grammar to correct it. OP's are the only ones who really understand the nuances of what they are trying to ask.

Why allow translation at all?

Some of us just want to be helpful. That's why we're here. Sure we should be careful to make things better and not worse. We shouldn't deter genuine help where it's offered.

I'd hate for a situation where those making genuine translations are told off for their actions and I fear that a "no translations" policy would lead to that.

In reality there are few good opportunities to offer translation. Once or twice I've offered translations to questions in Chinese by first machine translating it, discovering the result was enough to pique my interest; then cleaning up the grammar and asking my Chinese wife to help correct the translation.

It's so much effort that I've done this only twice.

But non-english questions show no effort and are almost always rubbish?

So are Kali Questions (usually).

If you read a question that's rubbish and in another language then you've got two reasons to close it.

If you happen to find a really good one and you can easily translate it, then surely translation is better.

Answer 2

TL;DR

Please don't just dump non-English posts into Google Translate (or equivalent) and hope for the best. If you can understand the language in question well enough to confirm that the translation makes sense, and the post is really worth keeping, then feel free to translate it, but don't just use an automatic translator and hope for the best.

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Questions posted in a language other than English on an English language site are unclear by definition and should be closed. We expect users to put at least the minimal amount of effort into their questions. That's one of the main reasons for downvoting and is what makes Stack Exchange so much better than the noise-filled forums that abound everywhere else on the internet. A user who simply posts their question in another language on an English-language site and can't even be bothered to i) attempt to write in English or, if they speak no English at all, ii) pass their question through Google Translate is failing to put any effort at all into the question.

I can understand a few languages which means I am unfortunate enough to be able to understand many of the non-English questions posted on the site. Sadly, in almost all cases, the different language is the least of the post's problems. As can be expected, if a user can't even be bothered to notice that they're on an English language site, they also can't be bothered to write anything resembling a clear, on topic question.

As far as I can recall, every time I translated a post, I also had to leave a comment requesting basic information from the OP. Frankly, posting non-English questions on an English language site is usually a good indication that the question itself is a poor fit for the site, irrespective of the language it happened to have been posted in.

That said, let's imagine you find a question whose only problem is the language and translate it. Now what? If the OP can't ask in English, chances are they also can't understand the answer. Conversely, if they can understand the answer, then they should have asked in English in the first place.

Unix & Linux isn't the one and only stop for *nix-related support and information on the internet. It is one of the top spots for English support and information, but there are dozens if not hundreds of helpful sites in other languages. Our target audience is not the world, but the portion of the world that uses *nix and can understand English well enough to ask questions in that language. It would never occur to me to go to an Urdu Ubuntu forum and post a question in English. I would consider that to be inconsiderate ("I don't care what language y'all speak, I'll just ignore that and post in mine") and rude.

We should make every effort to help people whose English is limited by editing and doing our best to understand what they are saying. Writing in a foreign language is hard and I have a lot of respect for people who post here despite not speaking fluent English. But if they are so inconsiderate as to just dump their question with no effort, then I don't think we should encourage that by translating.

Finally, automatic translations are bad. They rarely make much sense so when you do this, when you auto-translate a question, you have just added yet another bad question to the site. What's worse, it's a bad question that's very unlikely to be improved since the OP has already shown they're not willing or able to. This isn't helping anyone and is actively harming the site.

So, for me, the only case where translating a question would be worthwhile is when you can do the translation yourself, and the question is really good and clear and can stand on its own with no further clarification needed. For every other case, I would argue that translating is actively harmful and automatically translating is doubly so.

Proposed policy: Never use automatic translators to translate someone else's post. Avoid translating in general, except in exceptional cases where you can do the translation and the question is clear and good enough to stand alone.

Answer 3

There are a number of options available to us here. Here are three:

1. The least friendly but least effort approach is to close the question as unclear. This by itself doesn't help a poster whose first (and perhaps only) language isn't English. If you're going to take this as site policy then I would strongly urge you to explain to the poster why their question is unclear.

2. Encourage the poster to use automatic translation into English. This can lead to incomprehensible (or at least ambiguous) questions where machine translation simply cannot cope with a technical question. It also avoids closure due to lack of clarity.

3. Allow other site members to translate the question, possibly using machine translation, to the best of their technical ability. Such people might be bilingual and happy to invest their time in making a question understandable in English. (I understand that it's almost always easier to translate into one's native language than from it to another.) There is no point simply pasting the question into a machine translator and dropping the result into the question; it's about ensuring that the translation reflects the meaning and intent of the original.

As I understand it, #3 would be prohibited by the proposed site policy. I don't really see how it differs from someone editing a question to make it clearer, except in magnitude.

My personal preference would be to take these in reverse order. Don't stop people translating a question providing it's done well. While being very happy to reject non-English language questions on an English-language site, I would be averse to a site policy that simply closed non-English questions as unclear without any flexibility.