https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=translate.google.com
This ones pretty interesting and flagged for instance, Western media didn't pick up the story so that's a loss to the community if they liked it -
Google project loon balloon fall in Brazil -
https://g1.globo.com/to/tocantins/noticia/2021/03/02/balao-c...
Quite disconcerting many commentators here seem to not be able to use Google Translate or know of it's existence.
It is high value information when only a few have it (I disagree that the majority of important things get human translated)
Using translate and dealing with people who's poor English is their second language is an important skill.
If HN is just recreation, so much so hard articles are flagged so not to interfere with that. That's ok.
There are plenty of articles full of meme-speak that are intensely fascinating but I know if I want to share them with HN I'd better find or produce a version they'll find readable.
One dead link I would have likely have read is "Finland's “Broadband 4 everyone” is a total fuckup".
Thinking about it, I realized a downside of linking through Google Translate is that it's a bit more difficult to figure out if the domain name is a useful predictor of quality because it requires mousing over the URL instead of seeing the name. Perhaps that influences things?
Shouldn't get it flagged by the rules though.
You could script the domain to be beside the original site and do a HN tag like 'Ask HN:' 'Translated:'
That's a lot of work that might be for nothing.
Different cultures and how they present the news brings in conflict to monocultures like HN (IT Nerds). People complaining about X has news ads with accidents on the side for instance.
It also allow loopholes to no News rules, since a tabloid murder might be big in country X but not in English.
It also would educate people in other cultures and things bigger than what the Western media feeds us. Bruce Schneider was wrong the other day because he used Western media, rather than jumping on cyber documents the Chinese government publishes.
And wonky translate is probably the world's largest written language after Engrish as the largest spoken language.
Hard to know where the stability would lie. I think it might add valuable information and is a small iteration. The information is hugely valuable, but might not be useable on HN.
Your definition of "Western media" appears broad enough that it includes HN itself, as a US-based organization with US-based moderators.
As such, no matter what changes HN staff might make make, it would still be part of the Western media feeding us.
Of the 120 or so Google Translate links submitted in the last 1.5 years, only 5 appear to have a non-Western focus: 4 about China, and 1 on Japan. Many more were about Germany.
(Note: I stopped at 1.5 years because the [dead] links disappear beyond then. I am assuming they were removed from the database.)
By comparison, English language submissions from non-Western media doesn't appear to have the same high dead rate as non-English/Google Translate links.
Examples (enable showdead to verify):
The Hindu - https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=thehindu.com
Times of India - https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=indiatimes.com
Al Jazeera - https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=aljazeera.com
Korea Times - https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=koreatimes.co.kr
Korea Herald - https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=koreaherald.com
iAfrikan - https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=iafrikan.com
Therefore I don't think the issue is "links to non-Western media are flagged and killed."
I will note that after a while it must become self selecting though. If foreign language submissions never make it to the front page, eventually it will be rare that anyone bothers to submit the good stuff. Meanwhile the spammers will continue their attempts as usual.
Many of the times that I see a non-English link, it's spam, including completely non-HN-related links.
I went through the last ~25 hours of postings (with showdead enabled) to find foreign language links. What I found was that the dead links were to off-topic pages. Of the two non-dead pages, one in Spanish is mostly off-topic, and one in French is on-topic.
https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=noakmilo has a couple in Spanish. It appears to be promoting their tech news site that isn't HN-related. Eg, "how to get a GMail account (as explained by NASA)." (That one wasn't dead.)
https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=zmzm92 links in Arabic to a jobs site. Very off-topic.
https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=revistacomebien posted two links in Spanish, including "Protein shakes that you should prepare for training". Off-topic.
anton96 posted the on-topic «Unix à jamais: nouvelle série en cours sur le Club iGen» at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28078209 . gus_massa advised in the sole comment: 'post in other languages are usually ignored or flagged unless there is no equivalent information in English. At least translate the title to something like "Unix Forever: New Series Underway on Club iGen [in French]".'
I stopped at slightly more than 24 hours ago with a link by https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=elizehurley which often links to a blogger entries with titles in Turkish like "Learn English Without Taking a Course".