How Black&White are the language rules on Seasoned Advice?

Question

I've always been aware that, as a general rule, only English answers are allowed on the entire SE network, but I've recently posted an English answer containing quite a few non-English terms...

As a friendly mod and me stepped over one another, I've been reminded of the rules again as it looked like she was editing out some of the non-English terms.

So is it OK to use some non-English terms on Seasoned Advice if and only if:

• There is a clear (in this case heath) benefit for doing so
• There is no corresponding term in English (I always fall back to French, the de facto cooking language when I can't find/think of a correct English term ).

and:

• English remains the main language of both the Question and Answer

Quid?

Answer 1

This concise formulation of the rule indeed fails to cover edge cases like yours. The rule is actually meant to exclude single posts made by people in other languages - it allows moderators to delete them without having to understand what is in them - and to have people from other countries "hijack" the conversation and carry it on in a different language.

So, I would propose to understand the rule as "Your post should be easily understood by an English speaker" (with other languages allowed for the language specific sites on the network). This means that you can make posts concerning untranslatable concepts from a different language (e.g. Is it possible to make kataifi dough (by yourself or starting from filo dough)?), or explain translations as in the question you linked. As long as the post is usable by an English speaker, that's not a problem.