15

I spend a lot of time in the Triage. More and more I am seeing questions that are in a different language, I have been flagging these questions as "off topic/unclear what you are asking" and leaving a comment telling the user to re-ask the question on the respective Stack Overflow website for their language.

I was wondering why there is not an option to mark the question as belonging on a Stack Overflow in a different language like you can do if the question belongs on Super User or Cross Validated?

Off-Topic

Side question: is that the correct way to flag a question that is in a different language?

Improve this question
0

1 Answer 1

Reset to default
10

You're doing it right; flagging as "unclear what you're asking" is the right action. Don't (Google) translate the post into English; the author might not speak English at all. Leaving a comment is a good course of action as well.

One of the first rules of migration is "don't migrate crap". In a foreign language, it's hard to determine whether a question is good enough. For example, something that looks like a well-worded question in Spanish could actually be 'just' a problem caused by a typographical error. Therefore, there's a policy in place that questions (usually) aren't migrated between different Stack Overflow sites, not even by ♦ moderators.

That aside, there have been various requests to extend the list of migration targets, mostly on Meta Stack Overflow (example). They've all been declined (so far).

Improve this answer
1
  • 3
    I generally don't flag the question, but I do leave a GTranslated comment if I can identify the language in which the question was posted; the English version of my comment says that this is an English-language site, and questions should be posted in English; if there's a matching SO-in-that-language, the translated comment will also suggest that the user might want to look at the relevant SO.
    – Jeff Zeitlin
    Commented Oct 12, 2018 at 14:11

You must log in to answer this question.

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged .