Encourager la rédaction en français ne peut être que bénéfique pour le site. On peut aussi encourager la rédaction dans les deux langues. La question c'est : comment ? Quels moyens utiliser ?
Encouraging people to write in French can only be beneficial to the site. Writing in both languages could also be encouraged. The question is how? What means do we have?
The policy proposed by Gilles is understandable. Thought it is not what we want. We want to promote our site and let the community run it. Many people from the SEN may not understand French, or just a few, we do not want to put the language prevent progress and good question about French.
Robert Cartaino asked on GLU: https://german.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/22/should-we-translate-posts-as-a-community-norm
We clearly want to have question translated.
What would be in my opinion a good thing is :
I am not sure whether both question & answers need translation. And also, should we only ask for translation for good or accepted answers?
Anyway that is something to work with the SEI team.
Ringard ?
Let's see how all this would work:
"Hello welcome on the stackexchange network (SEN for short). SEN features among other things a fine selection of language oriented communities.
And more of these will come in due time: Russian, Italian, Spanish and Chinese.
Bringing in experts
I've read that one of the possible goal of privileging French in FLU is to bring in more experts. That looks like a fallacy to me. Even supposing that these experts would not feel confident in English, they still have the possibility to contribute in French.
Besides, all readers familiar with linguistics books have noticed that when their authors insert citations in such languages as English, German and even Latin or Greek they often omit the corresponding translations, thereby implying that these languages are assumed to be known to their reader.
It is probably worth pointing out that several of our finest experts in French are also English experts. I will name only two:
André Maurois, author of an outstanding "Histoire d'Angleterre", several biographies of English personalities (Disreli, Edward VII...) and much more.
Henriette Walter, a fine linguist author of Honi soit qui mal y pense.
Inclusive vs Exclusive
Should some kind of French-only policy be enforced, it is doubtless that after a few weeks only native speakers and possibly a handful of enthusiasts would be regular users of the community. Is this what we want?
As a conclusion, I find this proposal misguided.
I understand this question had to be raised at some point but I think we should put final nail in that coffin and move on.
I want to write as a non native speaker of French.
Personally I studied French for many years, and although my level went down and now it's coming back, I like to post in French. But I understand that many people don't know French, for various reasons.
In that case my personal policy, and I ask everyone who can do it to do it, is to write in both languages, offering a translation in French for native speakers and in English for those who don't know French. This is what I'll try to do.
I think we could adopt the policy that, when possible, we write both in English and in French. If someone doesn't know French, they can simply write in English. It's like this in other proposals too, see the German SE or the Japanese SE.
What should not be done is to impose some French-only policy. The people who don't know French will leave almost immediately, I'm very sure of this.
I do not think writing in both languages can be sustained as a matter of course. It's just too much work. (I'm prepared to do it on Meta, but even there it is time-consuming.) But posts must be in French, for the part of the audience who does not understand any other language. Therefore:
Policy proposal: All questions and answers must be in French. Questions asked in other languages will be closed; they can be reopened if someone (the asker, or any passer-by) offers a translation of at least the gist of the question. It is understood that askers may not be fluent speakers; we merely request that the question be comprehensible by a French speaker who does not speak any other language.
Je ne pense pas qu'il soit réaliste de demander d'écrire dans les deux langues. C'est trop de travail. (Je suis prêt à faire l'effort sur Méta, mais déjà là c'est difficile.) Les messages doivent être en français pour être compris des lecteurs qui ne parlent que cette langue. Ergo :
Proposition de règle : Toutes les questions et les réponses doivent être en français. Les questions posées dans d'autres langues seront fermées ; elles peuvent être rouvertes si quelqu'un (le demandeur original ou n'importe quel passant) fournit une traduction au moins de l'essentiel de la question. Il est reconnu que les demandeurs ne parlent pas forcément français couramment ; tout ce qui est demandé est que la question soit compréhensible par un francophone qui ne parle pas d'autre langue.
