What flag is appropriate for non-English, one-line answers?

Question

In the past two days I have run across two one-line answers that were not in English. One appeared to be in Spanish, the other in Hindi (to the best of my ability to tell; I don't speak either language). I used a custom flag for the first, and "not an answer" for the second to avoid bugging the mods, but I'm wondering if there is a better choice.

Specifically, my guess is that both are actually spam (I can't imagine another reason for such answers), but I can't tell for sure. I know that the consequences for spam flags are higher than for some of the other flags, so I'm reluctant to use it in an unclear situation—but on the other hand, perhaps we want stronger consequences for such posts (assuming they really are spam).

I used the custom flag the first time around so a mod could make the decision, but if this isn't going to be a once-in-a-blue moon situation, I'd rather just know what auto-flag to use (or know that the mods think it's appropriate to use the custom flag).

Answer 1

I limit use of the "spam" or "abusive" flags to cases where I realize the post is intentionally abusive of the site or the community. These flags have a punitive effect that probably shouldn't be imposed on a well-intentioned person.

I use the "not an answer" flag for answer posts that do not intend to answer the question. In the case of a non-English answer, that can be hard to determine. The output of Google Translate can sometimes be enlightening, when the writing style is not too idiomatic or informal for machine translation.

When a post is indecipherable, so that you can't even determine that one of the flags above applies, a good choice is the "very low quality" flag. VLQ is a rare flag, in theory. VLQ is specifically intended for posts which are indecipherable. It gets abused when people take "very low quality" too broadly. But indecipherable applies pretty clearly to posts that are untranslatable.

You are always welcome to throw a custom flag when you feel the existing flags don't describe the situation accurately.