What is our stance on cross-language duplicate questions?

Question

Since our site is supposed to be bilingual, sooner or later we will stuck into this question.

Say, two questions appear on our site, differing only by language used for asking:

1. Чому слово "собака" вживається як у жіночому так і в чоловічому роді?
2. Why the word "собака" is being used both as masculine and feminine noun?

Assume that both bodies are also exact duplicates.

Question: What should we do with these questions?

1. Close one as "exact duplicate"
2. Keep both

Answer 1

German.SE had the same question, and they've apparently came up with a nice solution:

Keep both.

It's because the two questions may come from different cultures and also from different search queries (nobody searches in the Internet in both languages at the same query).

In order to improve user experience, it is nice to link questions, like this:

This question also has an answer here (in Ukrainian):
Чому слово "собака" вживається як у жіночому так і в чоловічому роді?

or for an Ukrainian duplicate to an English question:

Це запитання також має відповідь (англійською):
Why the word "собака" is being used both as masculine and feminine noun?

For copy/pasting:

> **This question also has an answer here (in Ukrainian):**  
*https://ukrainian.stackexchange.com/questions/[question-ID]*

> **Це запитання також має відповідь (англійською):**  
*https://ukrainian.stackexchange.com/questions/[question-ID]*

Hopefully, as soon as StackExchange engine gets the feature of such markup, this title would become obsolete.

Answer 2

On French Language, our policy is to close questions as duplicates if they're asking the same thing, regardless of language.

Before doing that, we normally ensure that the answers are comprehensible. (The questions linked on our meta thread somewhat slipped through, I'll fix that.) If a thread appears to be interesting both to fluent French speakers and to fluent English speakers, we make sure that the main answers are available in both languages. This means we translate answers. The translation may be edited by anyone, not necessarily the author of the post.

Answer 3

2, surely mark as a duplicate and put link to the original question...