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[abdterp]

Okay, so if there's an article that looks sort of relevant to my diss, and it's in German (my author is English and wrote only in English), am I obligated to read/include it? Or is that  outside the scope of what my research needs to do?

[ahhh_history]

Well, how important is that article?  Is it cited frequently?  How relevant does it seem?  Can you find an abstract or review in another language (that you can read) that will help you determine its value/point?   (I'm going to assume that you don't read German.)

For my master's thesis, there were a number of related articles in Polish (of all the random languages).  Luckily, many of them included abstracts in French (which I do read), and none of them seem absolutely necessary to my research. 

AFAIK, you do not have to have read every single thing ever written that is even remotely related to your topic.  "Sort of relevant" probably isn't an article I'd stress over. 

[watermarkup]

Can you get a colleague to check the title and tell you exactly how relevant the article might be? Can you find a citation of the work in an article written in a language you do read?

When deciding to ignore an article, you have to take into account both the language, and the strength of the research tradition for your field in that language. You're probably safe to ignore articles written in Esperanto, but the German scholarship in a lot of fields (especially history and humanities) is too important to ignore safely.

[abdterp]

Well, I can puzzle through some German and it has an English summary. But I'm still torn on whether it's "important enough" to find someone to translate it for me.

[rockprof]

When I was working on my MS degree, a number of important papers were in French because a leading researcher was publishing in Comptes Rendus de l'Académie des Sciences.  Problem was, I didn't speak a word of French.  In addition, people I knew who did speak French couldn't understand the technical terms liberally sprinkled throughout the paper and couldn't make heads or tails of it.  This was before Babelfish and other free computer translation services.

Couldn't you simply run abstracts of these papers through Babelfish to see if it's appropriate to proceed further?

[figee]

Well, I can puzzle through some German and it has an English summary. But I'm still torn on whether it's "important enough" to find someone to translate it for me.

You're asking an impossible question.  We don't know what your research is on, what the article is on.... Take ahstudent's advice.  If it's cited frequently, you need to get it.  If not, then you probably don't, but really only you can make the decision.  If it's keeping you awake at night or it's going to bother you, get it so you know one way or another.  If it isn't, see if it's cited elsewhere, and if not, leave it.