tea.mathoverflow.net - Discussion Feed (Non-English posts)

Noah Snyder comments on "Non-English posts" (1690)

2010-01-10T17:50:07-08:00

I really think this is a non-problem. Almost everyone using MO can read math french, if they can't they should learn, and people posting questions know they'll get the widest readership by writing in English.

Harald Hanche-Olsen comments on "Non-English posts" (1634)

2010-01-09T07:28:49-08:00

@Tom: I understand why you don't want to name the two people you are talking about. However, without concrete information, this discussion can go nowhere. I certainly have no idea what you are talking about – I don't know a single instance of thoughtful, good faith contributions receiving a hostile welcome. But then I don't read all the posts, so I may well have missed it. If someone else can identify an example, maybe they could point it out (in a new thread) so we can discuss what went wrong?

Tom Leinster comments on "Non-English posts" (1633)

2010-01-09T05:50:59-08:00

Anweshi, I'm a fan of MO too, partly for the reasons you mention. But as I said, I know of two people who came here, made thoughtful contributions in good faith, were put off by the reception they got, and probably won't be coming back. If I happen to have come across two, there must be a lot of others out there.

We've gone off topic, anyway. Can I suggest that if you or anyone else thinks it's worth continuing to discuss this point, they start a new thread? Thanks.

Anweshi comments on "Non-English posts" (1632)

2010-01-09T05:28:45-08:00

@Leinster.

I find this forum already much softer and much more welcoming than any other internet forum I had been to. Here the differences vanish, undergrad, grad student, postdoc and senior professor all can speak out. It is so liberating. Where else can a grad student or undergrad can have a war of words with a prof? That itself is a big deal.

Edit: I do understand your concern of people leaving put off by the reception. When I observed one such instance here, I did try to put in my 5 cents for urging the concerned person to stay.

Tom Leinster comments on "Non-English posts" (1631)

2010-01-09T05:13:46-08:00

Anweshi, I agree that it happens, but I'm not as fatalistic as you. I think there are things we can do to foster more of a welcoming culture, and we should try to do them.

Anweshi comments on "Non-English posts" (1630)

2010-01-09T05:06:50-08:00

@Tom.

This kind of hostility to newcomers is common in all internet forums. Once I was not doing mathematics and had been part of another internet forum for a particular trend of software, and every newcomer had to go through a "hazing". I was not much taken aback here due to my past experience. The stack overflow software reduces such social cliques and politics and hazing. Still it will be there to some extent. This can't be helped. It is not the fault of the existing people or the creators. Blame human nature.

Tom Leinster comments on "Non-English posts" (1627)

2010-01-08T19:20:31-08:00

This is my first comment at Meta. I registered because I feel strongly about this.

I believe we should leave things exactly as they are. Everyone knows that English is the principal language of mathematical communication. It's perfectly clear from the site that if you post in another language, fewer people will understand you. So, as other people have observed, there is already an extremely strong incentive to post in English.

Anton says he's more concerned about questions in another language than answers in another language. Again I think this will sort itself out. If you're asking a question, it's because you want to know the answer, so this is when the pressure to use a widely-understood language is at its strongest. If you're answering, the pressure is less: you've got something the other person wants (knowledge), so you might leave it up to someone else to do the work of translation. That's OK. Perhaps you find writing English hard.

As for fragmentation, it doesn't worry me. The mathematical community is _already_ spectacularly fragmented. I don't understand the first thing about half the questions here. If someone asks a question about neural nets or nef cones or non-Newtonian fluids, it's as inaccessible to me as if it were in Chinese. And that's fine. All mathematicians are used to that, right?

I think it's highly unlikely that there will ever be many questions in languages other than English. But if it happened, it wouldn't bother me. If I went to the front page and saw that the list of questions contained some in languages I didn't understand, I'd just ignore them, in the same way that I currently ignore questions in subjects I don't understand.

Anecdotally and informally, I'm getting the impression that Math Overflow is acquiring a reputation for being unwelcoming. For example, Anweshi had a rather fiery experience when he arrived here. I also got an email from an acquaintance relating another bad experience with a first question. Another person I know was also put off MO by the reaction to his (careful, helpful) first contribution. I don't think either of the latter two people have returned.

Obviously this is a bad reputation for MO to acquire. We want to _attract_ good mathematicians, not put them off. Maybe part of the problem is that there are too many rules. So I'm wary of adding more.

Anweshi comments on "Non-English posts" (1620)

2010-01-08T12:02:47-08:00

@Anton. Of course posting a translation is not at all subverting someone's cultural identity. It is in fact doing a service to disseminate his knowledge.

Maybe we are paying a tribute to the Paris or France which was home to Grothendick and Serre, by being forced to read French.

Anton Geraschenko comments on "Non-English posts" (1618)

2010-01-08T11:53:42-08:00

Just to be clear, I'm not suggesting that I or the other moderators will produce translations. I just did this one as an experiment to see how hard it is to clean up Google's output into something presentable and to see how people would treat the translation once it existed. It wasn't very hard and didn't take long, but I did have to look up the thing about the sheep. My ability to read French is bad enough that I'd like to have translations of posts I'm interested in, and I'd be willing to do the first rough translation of future posts that interest me.

It seems like everybody with more experience than me says that my concerns are unfounded, which is reassuring. I'm happy to not do anything about non-English posts so long as posting/improving a translation is viewed as a good thing rather than an attempt to subvert the cultural identity of the person who posted the original.

Anweshi comments on "Non-English posts" (1612)

2010-01-08T07:41:27-08:00

@Anton. Like Buzzard says, it may be too much work for you. It is best to ignore single instances of posts in French, and leave the job to google translate. It is after all one-click. If there is really a need for translation, let someone do it. Otherwise this might take too much moderator time if you are going to moderate each such post by yourself.

Harry Gindi comments on "Non-English posts" (1611)

2010-01-08T07:22:35-08:00

Don't be coy.

Kevin Buzzard comments on "Non-English posts" (1608)

2010-01-08T06:31:30-08:00

Harry---I won't answer here because I don't want to turn the conversation away from the important issue of language. Start another thread if you want and I'll contribute there.

Harry Gindi comments on "Non-English posts" (1607)

2010-01-08T03:38:55-08:00

Why's that?

Kevin Buzzard comments on "Non-English posts" (1606)

2010-01-08T03:33:22-08:00

I'll just remark that I definitely would *not* have had the time to translate Fargues' post into English (not least because I read French). However, given that Anton did find the time, I could definitely find the time to spend a minute or two reading it through and fixing/clarifying the odd slip (and I added a couple of clarifications that weren't in the original post, with comments like [Ed: ...]). So it seems to me the system is working just fine. At the minute.

Unrelated issue: if I were the PhD supervisor of an administrator/moderator of MO, I would be genuinely concerned for the future of my student.

Scott Morrison comments on "Non-English posts" (1605)

2010-01-07T23:00:20-08:00

I don't think we should have a policy, and I don't think we should "do anything" about the non-existent problem, at least at this point.

I'm happy to close a question in a "non-mathematical language" (say, outside of English, French, German, Russian, Japanese) single handedly, but for anything where I think that sufficiently many readers can comprehend what's going on that if it were inappropriate for some reason other than the langauge then the moderators would hear about it, I'd ignore if I didn't understand, and otherwise be perfectly content.

There's just too much risk of annoying people, in exchange for the dubious benefit of preventing a seemingly very unlikely, and as yet non-existent problem.

Anton Geraschenko comments on "Non-English posts" (1603)

2010-01-07T21:52:21-08:00

@bwebster: Harry is right on target about what I want to avoid. Maybe you, pclark, and David Speyer are right that it's really a non-issue because it's basically never worth it to ask a question in Arabic, but I'm not completely convinced that it won't become a problem (though I am getting there). Right now, my goal is to understand where everybody else is coming from and why. I admit that I threw a possible solution out in an attempt to get people to argue for or against it so that I'd get to hear the arguments.

It seems like everybody agrees that generating a translation (even a crude one) is a good idea, or at least not harmful. I feel like this is pretty important to keep things well-integrated and keep from wasting peoples' time. The idea of having the original in the revision history was an attempt to bind the original to the translation more tightly than if they were just completely different posts. You're absolutely right that just having the original, then a horizontal rule, then a translation is a far better solution.

If someone doesn't have 2000+ rep, then I think it still makes sense to encourage them to post a translation (if that's something they're motivated to do) as a CW answer, and it can later be merged by someone who can edit the original. Extending this a bit, maybe it makes sense to start all translations as separate CW posts and merge them once they've become pretty good. That way the original poster is not penalized much (remember that a post is automatically converted to wiki if it is edited many times or by many users).

Harry Gindi comments on "Non-English posts" (1602)

2010-01-07T21:42:35-08:00

Does the software support collapsible "spoiler" boxes? Those would allow us to append the translation at the bottom of the post with a button "click here for translation".

David Speyer comments on "Non-English posts" (1599)

2010-01-07T21:34:41-08:00

But that isn't going to happen, because the overwhelming majority of the mathematical community speaks English. There is a huge incentive for anyone asking a question to do so in English; otherwise they will get very few answers. I can imagine a particular question switching to Russian, if everyone who is commenting is a native Russian speaker, but I can't imagine a whole separate Russian language MO community springing up. I've been to conferences in France, Germany and Japan, where the majority of participants were from the host countries, and most conversations were still in English with no policy needed.

And I also don't like the idea of hiding so much of the original answer. I still think it is best to have a separate translation answer, so that the translator can be rewarded for his efforts, but if you really don't like that then append the translation to the answer and leave the original in place.

Harry Gindi comments on "Non-English posts" (1597)

2010-01-07T21:01:03-08:00

The reason is that if we allow people to ask questions in a different language, we will end up with a fragmented community in the following way: most users speaking a given language will only answer questions in that given language.

Ben Webster comments on "Non-English posts" (1595)

2010-01-07T20:54:07-08:00

I still don't understand why Anton feels such an impulse to enforce English as a community norm. I mean, if you really want a question answered, it's deeply silly to ask it in Arabic or Sanskrit, but one shouldn't always try to stop people from doing silly things.

In particular, I really dislike the idea of replacing people's questions with an English translation as a community norm. I can see encouraging people with edit privileges to add an English translation to the post, but why hide the original in edit history?

Anton Geraschenko comments on "Non-English posts" (1589)

2010-01-07T19:57:22-08:00

As an experiment, I've added a community wiki translation to one of the answers. It didn't take long, but it's also not very good (like my ability to read French). I learned that the subject at hand is your sheep.

Emerton comments on "Non-English posts" (1584)

2010-01-07T19:32:47-08:00

Buzzard's question that Laurent Fargues answered was concerning a technical aspect of arithmetic geometry. Essentially everyone who works in that area is able to read mathematics in French. Laurent was cited in the question itself, and so is evidently one of the most qualified people to answer it. I think most (in fact, surely all) of the people interested in the question were delighted that he answered it. Those who know him also know that his remark about English not being required was a (slightly cheeky) joke, with no malice intended.

Harry Gindi comments on "Non-English posts" (1582)

2010-01-07T18:16:47-08:00

Cultural identity be damned. I agree with Anton that answers in other languages are acceptable, but questions in another language should not be tolerated (that might be a little stronger than what he said) because it will fragment the community.

Anweshi comments on "Non-English posts" (1579)

2010-01-07T16:54:57-08:00

The translation is just one click with google translate integrated onto google chrome, for instance. It is not much different in firefox either. So doing a piecemeal translation by hand with google translate and making it into a post is not going to make much difference and would be redundant work. Not to speak of being a bit reactionary. If someone wants so much to show that there are languages in addition to English, let them do it. We show back to them that google makes sure that it is not too much of a discomfort anyway.

Actually I had translated a 14 page French paper by hand, two years or so ago. It was very painful. Later I started to translate FAC and dropped it halfway out of frustration, though it was such a great paper.

The frustration in math overflow is infinitely less compared to those instances. I can understand essentially everything with a single click. A few idiosyncrasies are there of course, but nothing that hinders understanding. Let mother-tongue lovers stick to their language. We do not want people to drop their cultural identity. We are not here to build a mathematical tower of babel. That is the job of the software of google or altavista.

Anton Geraschenko comments on "Non-English posts" (1575)

2010-01-07T16:31:55-08:00

@David:

(1) Two actually separate posts would float around the answers list independently, which I think would make it harder to compare the original to the translation. If they're bound together as two versions in the revision history, it's obvious to everyone that you compare them by opening the revision history in a tab and tab back and forth (of course you can do this with two posts, but I think people would try to page-up page-down between them). This also ensures that there is a single comment thread for the answer. I admit it will tend to be long since it will include both comments about the translation and about the mathematics, but sometimes a comment you think is about the translation is actually a mistake in the math, or vice versa, so I view a single comment thread as a plus. One downside is that it would be harder to make edits to the original language version.

(2) I feel like the separate voting buckets is actually a downside. It makes posting in another language some sort of a special occasion, and it would be confusing to decide how to vote. Does the translator (whoever used Google first) really deserve as much rep as the poster? If not, when should you vote for the translation? What if the same person posted the answer and its translation? I really want translation to be automatic; just feed the original through Google and perhaps make some obvious corrections. In particular, I think it would be best if the person posting the answer also posted the translation immediately. If something is wrong with Google's translation, the original poster can probably fix it easily (he can probably read English fairly well if he's using MO). Even if he doesn't, everybody would understand that if something is amiss in the English version, the original is the first place they should look.

David Speyer comments on "Non-English posts" (1571)

2010-01-07T15:49:12-08:00

It seems to me that it would be better to post the translation as a separate answer. (With a note at the top stating that it is a translation.) This has the following advantages:

(1) The original is more visible, so it is more likely people will point out errors in the translation.

(2) The translator and the original poster can both get reputation for their work.

Anton Geraschenko comments on "Non-English posts" (1570)

2010-01-07T15:42:16-08:00

I think the discussion is becoming contentious because we're setting precedent on a topic that people care about. So the first thing I want to say is that we should be open to throwing precedent out the window if a good argument comes along or if the situation changes. Also, I realize people care a lot about their language, and that makes this discussion much more difficult to have. I don't want to offend anybody, and I'll try not to, but easily taking offence should not be a replacement for rational analysis.

The main problem in my mind with non-English posts is that they invite fragmentation. The nightmare scenario is that MO hosts two or more essentially non-interacting communities, which would irritate everybody. A few posts in other languages isn't going to do it, but it certainly creates tension. My intuition is that we should exert a definite pressure for people to post in English.

Some notes about these particular answers:

They're in French, which is a standard language for the topic. I think this makes them a little bit less of a problem.
They're good. If the choices are to have them in French or not have them at all, then we want to have them in French. In this case I'm a bit skeptical that this is really the situation. Laurent posted a comment on one of his answers which was in perfect English. I understand that composing a comment in another language is easier than composing an answer, but the comment seems so well-composed that it's hard to imagine it would have been much more effort to post the answer in English. Moreover, he was clearly able to read the questions and the FAQ, ending the answer with "P.S.: I read the rules for this forum: it is nowhere written the questions and answers should be written in english !!!!!!!!" I'm not sure how to read that, but it's not hard to read it as ending with "So there!" I want to allow for the possibility that someone has something to offer and can't write it in English, but I would get annoyed with somebody using technical terms that most people interested in the post would have to spend five minutes looking up or figuring out just because it would take slightly more effort to add a sentence explaining what those terms mean. And if I were one of the people who put in the time to make sense of the terms, I'd edit the post to make it easier for others.
They're answers, not questions. I think answers in another language are much less dangerous (from the point of view of community fragmentation) than questions in another language. If I want to know the answer to a question, and I see the answer posted in another language, then I'll do my best to make sense of it. On the other hand, if I see a question (suppose it's even in my field) in another language, I feel like it's much easier to just ignore it. I really want to avoid that. I'd much rather see questions in broken English with people could figuring out ambiguities in the comments and 2000+ rep users editing for clarity.

Proposed protocol (Edit: ignore this; see further comments)

What do people think about the following protocol for non-English posts?

If somebody really wants to post a question or answer in another language, they do it. Five minutes later, they (or somebody else) edits the post to replace it by an English translation, however crude (I think the results of just pushing the source through Google Translate are actually very good), and adds a line at the top saying "Original Arabic available in the edit history."

The bit about it being five minutes later is important because the system globs together edits occurring within five minutes of each other in the revision history, so if the original poster edits the post within five minutes of posting it, the original won't appear in the revision history.

This takes almost no additional effort on the part of the person posting, even if they know no English, it immediately and drastically reduces the risks and tensions of using many different languages, and the full text in its original language is available (completely rendered: here's an example) in a single click. I would also encourage 2000+ rep users to improve the translation (even better, give the improved translation to Google).

Ilya Nikokoshev comments on "Non-English posts" (1568)

2010-01-07T14:16:25-08:00

What if we ask people in the FAQ to look around a bit before posting a question? That would help to reduce the number of "But FAQ says this is appropriate???" discussions.

Harry Gindi comments on "Non-English posts" (1567)

2010-01-07T14:11:51-08:00

Could we at least strongly encourage English in the FAQ?

Ben Webster comments on "Non-English posts" (1565)

2010-01-07T14:00:58-08:00

I'm strongly in favor of not having a language policy. Given the nature of international mathematical discourse, I'm sure the site will stay overwhelmingly English, but I don't see how we justify trying to tell people what to do in one way or the other. People know perfectly well that the only language which is widely spoken and understood by the user base is English (I know there are a lot of speakers of other languages here, but not a lot of any particular one), and can draw their own conclusions from that.

Harry Gindi comments on "Non-English posts" (1562)

2010-01-07T13:50:04-08:00

Could we restrict the languages to English and French? Russian is too hard, and very few papers are published in German anymore.

Pete L. Clark comments on "Non-English posts" (1561)

2010-01-07T13:39:06-08:00

I don't think we need to have a policy explicitly welcoming posts in other languages, but I feel rather strongly that we should not explicitly discourage them either. So far the only foreign language posts to MO have been very positive contributions, so we certainly do not have a "foreign language problem" at present. Perhaps this discussion is becoming needlessly contentious.

Michael Lugo comments on "Non-English posts" (1558)

2010-01-07T13:28:40-08:00

I'm fine with people posting in French. I can read French. More importantly, for a native French speaker who is capable of writing English, it will take sufficiently longer to write in English than in French. Perhaps it will take so much longer that they decide not to post and therefore we miss out on some good answers. (For the record, I feel the same way about German, which I barely read, and Russian, which I don't even know the alphabet of; these are the two other big mathematical languages.)

If it were possible to tag individual answers, I would recommend tagging non-English answers with the name of the language they're in. This would make it easy for somebody who wanted to spend some time translating foreign-language answers into English (which is the dominant language of the site) to find them. (I would try my hand at translating Fargues' answers myself, except that this isn't my area, and so I'm afraid I'd introduce errors.)

I suspect that if this site becomes popular enough among speakers of language X that people want to post in it, there will also be speakers of language X who have moderation ability, so moderation might not be an issue. In any case, let's worry about that if it happens.

Georges Elencwajg comments on "Non-English posts" (1556)

2010-01-07T12:53:30-08:00

Cher Pete, je n'ai pas d' opinion très arrêtée sur le sujet mais je trouve votre pragmatisme et votre ouverture d'esprit fort louables (ces qualités se retrouvent d'ailleurs dans vos autres interventions).
Par ailleurs, le défi consistant à rédiger questions et réponses dans un anglais acceptable est une séduction supplémentaire qu' exerce sur moi notre merveilleux site "mathoverflow". Comme vous voyez le débat reste ouvert et intéressant !

Kevin Buzzard comments on "Non-English posts" (1554)

2010-01-07T12:21:41-08:00

Let me absolutely stress that the guy in question, Laurent Fargues, is a complete god in the theory of finite flat group schemes. He has given a beautiful answer to a very technical question of mine using a trick which I had completely overlooked, as had the handful of experts I'd already asked about this. If he wants to post in French then let him post in French. That's my point of view anyway. Letting people post in an arbitrary language is another matter though. Take a random top journal: their language policy will almost certainly be "English, French, German, that's it".

Harry Gindi comments on "Non-English posts" (1551)

2010-01-07T11:56:01-08:00

plclark, I think that opening up that door is a really really bad idea.

Ilya Nikokoshev comments on "Non-English posts" (1549)

2010-01-07T11:31:24-08:00

Everything else similar, I would prefer to read post in English. But, let's make a real-world analogy.

Suppose I happily live in a middle-class nearly completely English-speaking suburban utopia and somebody moves in (pick up your choice your choice of French-speaking, Korean-speaking or something else). I would prefer if the new person spoke in English (I love to chat and so), but I can express this in a different way:

(1) You should speak English, or I'll come and beat you up

(2) You should speak English, or you'll have a hard time communicating with others

I hopefully don't need to explain why (2) is a better thing to suggest in real life.

In the case of MO, I'm sure any non-English-posting person will soon notice that posting in English allows more people to read his post and brings more reputation. So, I' m willing to bet that the "problem" will correct itself (edit: one of possible corrections is that it will be obvious to everyone that the particular non-English posts are so worthwhile that we will be happy about them).

Moreover, mathematicians (as a culture) are really polite and try not to duplicate posts, but in this case I could imagine another person posting an answer that translates Laurent F.'s answer, citing him, and grabbing some attention and reputation that Laurent could get. Once this happens, the motivation to write in English will again increase.

Pete L. Clark comments on "Non-English posts" (1548)

2010-01-07T11:30:23-08:00

I don't feel as strongly about it, but I don't see why not. I think asking your question in a language other than English would only be a good idea if you don't write English well enough to have your question make sense, so it is a sort of implicit plea for translation. It might be a good idea to encourage translation of questions and answers into English by asking them to be entered as answers and having them get upvoted.

rwbarton comments on "Non-English posts" (1547)

2010-01-07T11:25:23-08:00

Pete, does that go for questions in other languages, too?

Pete L. Clark comments on "Non-English posts" (1545)

2010-01-07T11:14:50-08:00

I think posts in all languages should be allowed. (And I say this as someone who can read mathematics only in English and French.) The questioner has the right to say, "Sorry, I don't speak XX; could someone please translate?" If the answer is good, very likely someone _will_ come along to do the translation. It seems quite against the spirit of fellowship and collaboration among the worldwide mathematical community to pick and choose certain languages to outlaw.

Jon Awbrey comments on "Non-English posts" (1544)

2010-01-07T11:12:09-08:00

Just tack a Babelfish button somewhere handy …

rwbarton comments on "Non-English posts" (1543)

2010-01-07T11:00:32-08:00

This guy has answered a couple questions in French. Should we have a policy about posts in languages other than English? In this case, his answers seem to be quite helpful, and probably most people here can read French pretty well. (And I have encountered a few posts which I would probably have an easier time understanding in whatever the original language was...) However, if we started getting questions and answers in, say, Korean, it might pose some problems for our moderators.