[lg policy] meta.physics.stackexchange: Do we have a language policy?

[Harold Schiffman]

Do we have a language policy?
up vote 4 down vote favorite
1
	

I'm looking at http://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/519/what-now-is-the-surface-temperature-of-the-neutron-star-which-was-formed-12-bil:
part of the question was asked in Russian, which is the first time I
can recall seeing a non-English question on a Stack Exchange site.
Should we do something about questions in other languages? Edit a
translation into the body of the question, perhaps? (Assuming someone
is confident enough in their language skills to do the translation) Or
do we just leave them as they are?

discussion language
link|flag
	
asked 2 days ago
David Zaslavsky
1,3018
	
	
One school of thought on this is to leave them as they are (unless
there is someone capable of translating and preserving the intent of
the questioner) but with the caveat that they are restricting their
audience (severely?) – J. M. 2 days ago
1 Answer
oldest newest votes
up vote 2 down vote accepted
	

The following is with respect to SO (StackOverflow, the site that
started the whole SE business), which we are not but since it works
good there we should at least think about this:

Jeff Atwood stated (regarding non-english posts on http://stackoverflow.com)

    I believe programmers who speak only Mandarin, or French, or
Spanish, are better off forming their own communities and centers of
gravity. Shared language is one of the fundamental aspects of
community.

    Just visit Chinatown in nearby San Francisco to see what I mean..

After some digging I found this blog post from '07 as a follow-up on
the discussion We need to help non-English-speakers somehow…, and the
faq-entry Is English required on Stack Overflow?

So, on SO the policy is:

    I say keep it in English. I'm not against diversity or other
languages, I'm for us all being able to communicate under one. This
isn't political, this isn't about smothering peoples cultures with
Western ideologies. It is about being pragmatic.

I do agree that multiple languages on one site cause confusion. But we
should not "ban" non-english speakers, so I suggest we do not vote on
non-english posts (both questions and answers) and try to translate
things to english as good as possible. As soon as the correctness of
the translation is verified, the original text should be removed - it
will still be available by clicking on the edited by link. Maybe one
can edit in a
[original version in
russian](http://physics.stackexchange.com/posts/519/revisions#rev3252802a-affc-499f-9316-3e44d8a4f81c)
link or post that as comment, for example.

http://meta.physics.stackexchange.com/questions/68/do-we-have-a-language-policy

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