Many of you know that I have already made a lot of bug reports on MSE since my "home" site is Stack Overflow in Russian. But, there are still many images there that need to be supplemented with extra wording and explanations as to what's displayed in them. While (instead of taking a screenshot) it is possible to translate the page back into English via Google Translate, the results are often significantly different from the original English.
What I would like to suggest is to add an optional key to the URL like ?show-original=true. In this case, the page content (of course only part of the site UI, not content created by users: posts, comments, etc.) will be generated bypassing the step of getting translations from the Transifex database.
This will reduce the time it takes to find the source English string (and hence the total time spent to create a bug report) in the case of localization issues. For the regular user UI, it's not so hard to open SO in English, but there are some restrictions in more complex cases:
- enSO code base is different from other localized SO sites
- some features are not accessible due to a lack of reputation on the English-based site
- mod-related features are accessible only on the site that the user is able to moderate
Besides bug reporting (when a screenshot from a non-English site is required), it may also simplify access to the localized site for English-speaking people.
Undoubtedly, the complexity of implementing this feature relies on how hard it is to bypass the translation phase of the site interface in the SE engine on a page-by-page basis.
