First of all - I am not English speaker
Sometimes it takes a lot of time prepare my post or participate in the discussion
But there is dangerous trend I see in latest posts - usage non-English in posts titles and content
De-facto English is esperanto of software developers
Usage of non-English makes communication difficult
And I know that it’s ok according to misc. policies
Let’s discuss
I agree, I’d much rather if the person not speaking English used some tool to translate, rather than forcing everyone else to translate. They are also in the better position to evaluate if the translation matches what they want to say, if they can read some English.
I’m quite fond of the way Zig does it, post in your native language and offload translation to readers. But it does make sense there, while here on the forum poster translating is probably the better idea of the two. The only downside is the potential of translators outputting something that resembles vibe code slop and thus getting false slop accusations, so I guess it could be made so posters are encouraged to disclose translator usage?
For me It is quite strange to see something like
在官方的代码托管地址的
My preference would be: chinese people just copy paste an english translation into this forum.
lingua franca is the word you were looking for.
Zig and Ziggit have different policies regarding LLMs and language. Ziggit’s restrictions on LLMs are not as strict, which may cause some users who changed their communication style in the Zig community due to LLM limitations to not immediately notice the difference when switching to the Ziggit community.
For non-English text, people should annotate what language it is in case the translation tools can’t auto-detect it.
What if we had a translated tag?
Writers could write in English, and add the tag if the text was AI-translated, or they wrote it manually but are not sure if their own translation transfers the meaning correctly.
I’m in the latter situation sometimes.
This could also help the reader, eg if the text comes over as offence, maybe it’s just a slightly incorrect translation.
Mi ne zorgas pri ne-anglaj enhavoj (tamen havi defaŭltan tradukilon ene ziggit estus utila). Sed ne-anglaj titoloj ja estas ĝenaj ĉar oni bezonas plian tedon por eĉ scii ĉu la artikolo interesas onin.
I don’t mind non-English content (though having a default traduction-tool within ziggit would be useful). But non-English titles are tedious because they require a bit of effort to even know whether we’re interested in the post.
I do, from a practical point of view.
This forces a great part of the potential readers to translate on their device (or in their heads), with possibly different results.
This wastes resources (time and energy) and many readers will just not take the effort to translate, so it reduces the number of potential helpers for no good reason.
If this was a program, I’d call it an n+1 problem and indeterministic, which I’d try to optimize.
The rules allow for AI (strict) translation because English is the language of the forum. Since you are referring to a recent post, I left it up because of the unique situation. The user had been banned from Zig repo for using AI to translate, and so didn’t use AI to translate here. Even though Zig and Ziggit are separate, it would be a bad experience to be punished both ways when trying to participate in the community as a new member.
PL:
Myślę, że obecny regulamin, który zacytowałeś, jest jak najbardziej w porządku. Nie ma sensu zmuszać innych do pisania po angielsku, jeśli nie potrafią lub nie chcą, natomiast powinni wtedy liczyć się z potencjalnie mniejszą ilością osób chętnych do dyskusji.
Jeśli chodzi o mnie to praktycznie w ogóle nie mam kontaktu z programowaniem w swoim rodzimym języku, a większość treści, które oglądam w internecie są po angielsku. Jeśli nie umiałbym angielskiego na tyle dobrze, żeby swobodnie się nim posługiwać, to chyba i tak lepiej by było, gdybym ja starał się zweryfikować tłumaczenie AI/tłumacza z moją nikła znajomością angielskiego, bo doskonale wiem, co miałem na myśli pisząc dane słowa. Ktoś zza granicy, kto w ogóle nie umie mojego rodzimego języka, może jedynie zgadywać co autor miał na myśli i jest skazany na ślepe ufanie temu, co wypluje tłumacz.
EN:
I think that the current rules that you brought up are perfectly fine. There’s no point in forcing others to write in English, if they can’t or don’t want to, but then they should be aware that there will be less people willing to take part in the discussion.
When it comes to me, I have no contact with programming through my native language, and most content I consume online is in English. If I didn’t know English well enough to use it freely, then I think it would still be better if I tried to verify the AI/translator with my poor knowledge of English, because I know exactly what I thought when writing what I wrote. Someone from abroad, who doesn’t know my language at all, can only guess what the author intended and is forced to blindly trust the translator.
EN through chatgpt:
I think the current rules you quoted are perfectly fine. There’s no point in forcing people to write in English if they can’t or don’t want to, although they should then expect that fewer people may be willing or able to participate in the discussion.
As for me, I have virtually no contact with programming in my native language, and most of the content I consume online is in English. If my English weren’t good enough for me to use it comfortably, I would still think it makes more sense for me to verify an AI or machine translation with my limited knowledge of English, because I know exactly what I meant when I wrote those words. Someone from another country who doesn’t know my native language at all can only guess what the author intended to say and is forced to blindly trust whatever the translator spits out.
I 1st wrote the post in Polish, then wrote it myself in English, and at the end ran it through chatgpt. Is the original intent lost? I don’t think so. The chatgpt translation sounds maybe a bit more native, but I think both get the point across well.
I - OP did not ask to ban
Just to discuss
I am also familiar with this process 
I like more what you wrote yourself It’s easier to read and understand. But I think that’s because Polish is similar to my native language, so semantics and sentence construction are similar and they get carried over. Just speculation though
I like the idea, but it only really works for the original post. It would be good to have something that works for comments as well.
For me, the easiest would be to set up the culture of noting in ones topic or comment that a translation tool was used so that the community can be more understanding.
Maybe just start with a line like
DE>EN
then, which should be clear enough?
On the other hand forcing people to at least somewhat understand English isn’t a good thing either.
I know that quite a few science journals are discussing what to do about their English requirement since they noticed that it keeps out quite a few very good scientists and papers entirely because of the language requirement.
And it’s not like it’s necessary to know English to have a career as a programmer. I once had a colleague (for like a few weeks) who didn’t know any English at all but were working as a programmers for quite a few decades before retiring about 2018. Sure, it lead to German comments, variable and function names and so on, but that’s because it’s the most descriptive in that case.
And in general I think translation (not just between languages but also between terminologies) is something to actively minimise since it inevitably leads to semantic mismatches (and these can be expensive). And yes, that means that if a word is not cleanly translatable into English (or from one technical language into a different one (e.g. physics speak into IT speak)), please don’t translate it in your codebase. It will create bigger problems than it’s worth even if it looks awkward.
But back to topic, because I think it’s something to minimise, I also think that it should be posted in the original language. Sure, add an “official” translation if you want to, but that should be an (optional) addition, not a replacement.
Here an example: I make a post in German. You go and translate it into English. Somebody else goes and translates it into Spanish. We have one layer of translation in both cases.
Here another example: I think in German first, translate it into English. You go and read the English translation. One layer of translation. Somebody else translates the English into Spanish for themselves. Two layers of translation.
I think we all know the game telephone. The more layers of translation you have, the more you are asking for problems involving the very same problems which come with it. And if one translation is done by somebody (or something) with questionable translation skills, that just supercharges these problems.
And here a meta-food for thought: English being the lingua franca comes entirely from the USA’s current position in the world and that IT comes from there. But that wasn’t always the case. For example during the first half of the 20th century (and a bit before) the lingua franca of physics (and for a lesser extent mathematics) was German but the one of engineering was English (thanks to the British). And during the middle ages (and a few centuries afterwards) it was Latin and Arabic (depending on where you were on the world). And looking a bit into the future, in some fields in physics and engineering Chinese starts to become more and more important. So it could be that in the coming decades the “English for everything” situation in science we have right now will start to break apart again.
I’ve been using translation tools to check what I write in Japanese before I send it. Google Translate has 2 modes: “classic” and “advanced”. The advanced one uses Gemini.
The classic one is the more useful translator because it’s more literal. The advanced one is more generous to my errors because it guesses what I mean, but it also hallucinates nuance that I don’t actually intend to express.