New user asks: Are requests for proverbs and sayings (as opposed to single-word idiom requests) on-topic?

Question

I am new here since this year; this question is to help me understand the culture. I answered a new question, asking for an equivalent of Catalan 'Gent jove pa tou' or 'Young people soft bread' referring to being too young for certain tasks, with a US idiom-phrase. Later, however, I began to doubt whether this is an officially supported kind of question. A quick search for "proverbs" and "multi-word idioms" on ELU Meta seemed to mostly point to posts related to SWRs. The closest that I found was a comment at Is the EL&U community generally more receptive to idiom-requests that seek English equivalents for foreign phrases? which says:

ELU is a question and answer site for linguists, etymologists, and serious English language enthusiasts + idiom (single-word) enthusiasts.

(Which is copied more or less from the mission statement). But other comments there, as well as the OP, mention that there are many well-received questions about multi-word proverbs.

I like these questions a lot, as they have a sort of human interest element, bu they tend to be rather subjective and regionally specific, as my answer at the "soft bread" question is. Up-votes aren't everything; my most-voted answer so far was for a SWR on which I spent very little work, only copying a dictionary definition and an example use in the NYT. It was up-voted only because it answered the question, not because it is a High Quality Answer.

At Why did mods delete two answers to 'Quitting your job too early'?, a question asking for a proverb is discussed in harrowing detail, and even answered. However, no official consensus about "proverbs" is invoked, except that they should be in use in English, not just borrowed on the spur of the moment.

So, are these proverb questions officially supported, or are they considered Low Quality or simply Off-topic?

Answer 1

Yes, proverb or idiom analog requests are very much on-topic.

But, like SWRs, there may be in practice lots of ways to ask these badly and attract too many poor answers.

For proverb/idiom requests, if they are looking for a corresponding one from another language/culture, please give the original language version (the answer may be very close to a translation) and give the cultural context (many European languages have different wordings for the morals from Aesop's Fables).

Also, as with all questions, give what your research may have already found.

Answer 2

There is no rule that specifically prohibits such questions, and there is, in principle, no reason why there should be.

Proverbs, however, tend to be very much culture-bound, so the correct answer to such questions will very often be 'There is no analogous proverb in English'. Such an answer would, however, not satisfy the standards of this site, so it won't be posted. Instead, the question will likely generate a number of answers offering English proverbs that don't have quite the same function, but are in some way similar. The page then turns into a contest on who can come up with an English proverb that is the closest to the original one, which is, I think, what @Yosef Baskin was pointing out in his comment. Determining which proverb 'wins' the contest will often (but not always) be a matter of opinion. These questions may thus, in practice, be at odds with the policy of avoiding questions that cannot be given definite answers.