Google Translate is fantastic for information. It is terrible for leisure reading. The vast majority of HN readers are here recreationally. For someone to want to read a Google translated page it has to both be important information but not so important there's a human-translated version of it. That doesn't leave a lot left.

> That doesn't leave a lot left.

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.

If the information is that high value the submitter is free to translate it themselves. Readers don't have any more moral duty to machine translate and pick through a foreign language submission than they do to try and glean value from a submission written in terrible English by a teenybopper who doesn't use capitalization or punctuation and fills the page with emojis.

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.

You are right. A decent sized fraction of those Google Translate links don't seem out-of-place on HN had they been about the US. It makes me wonder if providing a GT link might be worse than linking directly to the non-English page (with an English description), then writing a comment linking to the GT page.

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?

> it's a bit more difficult to figure out if the domain

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.

> Western media

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."