Timeline for What is the site etiquette about (i) asking and (ii) answering questions in a language other than English?
Current License: CC BY-SA 2.5
7 events
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| Apr 16, 2016 at 18:57 | comment | added | hmakholm left over Monica | I would add for questions that it really helps to include a sentence in English (even halting ungrammatical English) where you say that you will be able to understand answers in English. Otherwise the whole thing can feel a bit pointless. | |
| Aug 29, 2011 at 4:35 | comment | added | Alex B. | It is also worth adding that for good translations, it is much more important to be very comfortable with the language one is translating into than the one one is translating from. So it would probably greatly improve the quality of English that we see on this site if posters who are not completely comfortable with English posted in their native language or some other widely known language that they speak. I bet that questions in German, Russian or French will almost never remain untranslated for longer than an hour or two. | |
| Feb 9, 2011 at 18:45 | comment | added | Peter LeFanu Lumsdaine | Translating really well is hard; but translating well enough to be useful is not too much work for anyone who knows both languages. In particular, translating a question is (in my experience) much less work than even thinking seriously about how to answer it. Especially if “peer-reviewed edits” come to math.se, widening the pool of translators, I don’t think the danger of a good non-English answer blocking an English answer is very serious. | |
| Feb 9, 2011 at 6:14 | comment | added | Akhil Mathew Mod | @Jeff: Dear Jeff, I wouldn't expect posters to use a foreign language unless they were much more comfortable with it, as it would be much less likely to be read and answered. So I think there is a built-in disincentive to doing so from this being a primarily English-speaking website. | |
| Feb 9, 2011 at 4:21 | comment | added | Jeff Atwood Mod | this might be OK so long as the question is translated into English. I guess it also depends on the community's willingness to do this work on behalf of the askers, and how many there are. Opening the door to this is a bit dangerous in my opinion, as it could engender a "translate this and do my work for me" mentality on the part of question askers. | |
| Feb 8, 2011 at 23:00 | history | edited | Pete L. Clark | CC BY-SA 2.5 |
added 125 characters in body
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| Feb 8, 2011 at 17:44 | history | answered | Pete L. Clark | CC BY-SA 2.5 |