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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.
Just tack a Babelfish button somewhere handy …
Pete, does that go for questions in other languages, too?
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
or
(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.
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.
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.
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.
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:
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).
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.
@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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
@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).
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. 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.
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.
@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.
@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.
@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: 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?
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