What to do with duplicate questions in another language?

Question

This question is content-wise a pretty clear duplicate of this question, however the latter question is asked and answered in German while the second one is asked in English and the asker remarked that she cannot understand the German question.

How should we deal with such cases?

Note that the issue as to whether such questions are duplicates has been discussed before but this was in the first few hours of this site’s existence and arguably very prematurely. Also, it does not cover the current case that the asker of the duplicate cannot understand the other answer.

Answer 1

Let me suggest to leave the question open. The question per se may be an exact duplicate but the audience, and hence the answers probably are not.

People searching for a solution may come here either by an English query or by a German query. It seems unlikely they search simultaneously in both languages.

We should however link to both questions in a very similar way to the dupe close messages so that whoever finds one of both will be directed to answers on the other question too.

Example for a German dupe of an English question

This question also has an answer here (in German):
What to do when the asker cannot understand the duplicate question due to it being in the other language?

or for a German dupe to an English question:

Diese Frage wurde auch hier (auf Englisch) beantwortet:
What to do when the asker cannot understand the duplicate question due to it being in the other language?

Zum Kopieren:

> **This question also has an answer here (in German):**  
> *http://german.stackexchange.com/questions/[question-ID]*

> **Diese Frage wurde auch hier (auf Englisch) beantwortet:**  
> *http://german.stackexchange.com/questions/[question-ID]*

Answer 2

I suggest to close such questions as duplicates to avoid fragmenting of content and avoiding duplicate answers.

However, in order to help users in such a situation, I also propose that we create a default procedure for such users to request translations. To this purpose, I suggest to create a meta question for translation requests. This question should be bilingual and users can post answers to request translations of existing posts from German to English or vice versa. The respective translations should be edited into the original answer.

As a prerequisite for requesting a translation there, a comment should have been left on the original post asking the author for a translation and been left unanswered for 24 hours. This is because translations by the original authors are preferrable as the original author knows best what he wanted to say and edits by other users might cause dispute. In most cases, the proposed time window should give the original author sufficient time to at least state his intentions on translating the post himself.

It would be nice if users could gain reputation for translations for translating other user’s posts (translating one’s own post could be awarded a bounty). but the only way I see to realise this with the current system would be using individual answers for the translations, which I consider to be a bad idea, since it is confusing and making questions disorganised. (If bounties were allowed on per-site metas and we would use one question per translation request, they could fascilitate this.)

Answer 3

This will lead to duplicate answers (and discussions) in both questions and should be avoided. The person can ask in comments or chat what is unclear. The usability of the site is not for persons, who don't have basic language knowledge.