How should we manage questions where English is not the person's native tongue?

Question

I think we should give wide latitude to encourage questions from people who do not speak English or speak it poorly. Simple grammar changes are usually easy enough to edit in but sometimes it may take more effort to understand exactly what is meant.

I recently edited a question where I was not sure if I captured it adequately but something needed to be done so it was clear enough to answer. Is that the best approach? Is there a better way to engage the person asking the question to help with clarification? It doesn't seem to me that comments always work to tease these things out.

Answer 1

I tend to agree with you regarding given non-native English speakers a wide latitude with questions that are not written as a native speaker would write questions.

Like you, I have edited such questions, on this site & other sites on Stack Exchange. On one occasion a person posting a question wrote a comment thanking me for making the question more understandable. The end result was that the question was answered by someone who was knowledgeable in that field. Getting an answer to questions what this site is about.

Questions should be salvaged where possible.

I think your approach is reasonable.

Occasionally questions will be written where it is exceedingly difficult to decipher what is being asked. We have limited means of communication with each other and on such occasions we can only prompt the person asking the question to elaborate further, if possible. If no further qualification is offered such questions may need to be deleted.

What irritates me however, is when a question is posted by someone who is a native English speaker, but the question has been very poorly written: issues of grammar, spelling, punctuation or capitalization. Even these questions should be salvaged if possible.

Answer 2

Try to edit, ask for details and comment on non-obvious assumptions for used for your edits.

Ask to post the question in a different language on meta to get to help with the translation. We may have domain experts with relevant language skills. You can also refer to language specific stackexchange sites.

Vote to close the question, if none of the above helps.