Supported languages and translations - a quick question

[chatterbox42]

I've read and re-read the Terms of Service and various threads but I want to be sure, so all apologies if this has been answered before.

My site has always been English-language, and if I understand correctly, I could also present it in French or Spanish. I've also read a couple threads which state that any other language used on x10 must also include translations into one of these supported languages.

I'm presently a student of French, Italian, Swedish and German and I want to know if I'm allowed to create a blog to practice in these languages provided I include the French equivalent in each post. In other words, if I wrote an entry in Swedish, German or Italian and included a French translation each time - would that be permitted, even if I wrote nothing at all in English?

 

[essellar]

Yes, that would be perfectly acceptable — provided that the French was real French and not, say, Babelfish or Google Translate "Frenchais" (Even Canadian French, which is not considered acceptable by many in Europe, is acceptable here. French creoles like mauricienne, réunionnaise or Haitian Creole French are another matter; they're sufficiently far from the standard that a native English speaker who is fluent in French may not be able to understand them at all — even if a native speaker of French might be able to wrap their heads around them with only a little difficulty.)

 

[interne3]

@essellar Meaning that if I wrote something in Japanese or Chinese and I wrote everything in English below the Japanese or Chinese, that would be acceptable? So the line about languages in the TOS basically means you MUST have AT LEAST those languages on your website?

 

[essellar]

Yes, that's it in a nutshell. And the content doesn't have to be interleaved or side-by-side; there just needs to be an obvious way to get to a version of all of the content that is in one of the three supported languages. The translation needs to be an accurate, human-produced translation. (So it doesn't necessarily have to be word-for-word, since things like word order and idiomatic expressions can vary wildly from one language to another, but rather idea-for-idea. Don't be surprised if someone compares your translation occasionally to a machine translation — even if the machine translation is gibberish, there's usually enough information accidentally leaking through to determine whether or not the content in the supported-language version is the same as in the other-language version. The checks are to ensure that blatant ToS violations in the other-language version are not being masked by a parallel website in a supported language that just happens to have the same number of pages.)

 

[chatterbox42]

Thanks essellar! It will be 'real' non-machine-translated French, hand-written personally by me to mirror any of the other languages. (I'm not a 'new' student where French is concerned. Accurate translation won't be a problem.)