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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:

and:

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

Quid?

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  • The question specifically asked for English terms, though... The question title is "What other English names are there for dried grapes?".
    – Catija StaffMod
    Sep 14, 2018 at 22:37
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    @Catija Yes, I know, but sometimes you have to give people what they need and not what they want. In this case the OP was glad with that answer and accepted (which is a rare event here on Cooking) 0:-)
    – Fabby
    Sep 14, 2018 at 22:54

1 Answer 1

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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.

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  • What you describe is what's commonly referred to as writing in English, which is what the rules ask for. I'm not really sure why writing in English would absolutely prohibit using non-English terms, so yes, agreed, it's totally fine to do things like what you mentioned, and that doesn't mean the post isn't in English (the rule is still black and white - no one is sneaking in a post that's not in English).
    – Cascabel Mod
    Sep 12, 2018 at 18:13

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