I fully understand that it takes time for a community grows internationally. But I think the community Devcoin not pay enough attention to this point. It would encourage more translators doing more advertising and may be paying more (I do not know how you win a translation from an original text).
Thank you this is a very good idea. But my main concern is to have more text to read in French. And there's thousands of interesting texts in English that are unaffordable for many people. Devtome is for readers, not for authors. It should attract a maximum number of readers, I think this is the best way to encourage new writers.
Of course it is obvious that translate English text into another language brings more readers than the reverse, but that does not mean we should neglect this aspect.
I understand your points. The main aspect is that devtome is open-source. That means any material submitted can be copied anywhere. This also means there's an issue of copyright. A text written in a foreign language, if it's your own, and translated is fine. But does an english translation of a french text written by somebody else breach the original author's copyright? Probably. The same problem exists for submitting foreign language writings - there has to be a means of ensuring they're original because once on Devtome it's open-source - and this will take a pretty significant number of people to monitor.
So I don't think there's any particular reason why it can't be done, it's that pragmatically it's very difficult to do properly.
On your point about translations generally. That works in the same way as for submitting english work. You can't just take a foreign language text, translate it word for word into english and submit it as original. Checks on this aren't perfect, but there are checks. But you could improve upon an exisiting foreign language article(s) and submit as 'collated' which means it's based on another article, but rewritten in your own words with improvements, or bringing together various sources for example - and making it clear what those sources/original articles were.