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Thanks for help confirming that I have the right compromise solution Dr. Pete! Yep, I am going to that as well on GWT. Only problem is that it takes those dev's months to put in the html file so I could verify it.

Hi, I am not sure but I would recommend it's use is to 'hide' pages from the robots, not really for anything else.  It is used for exclude content from being crawled,  you can add this tag manually to all pages that they don't want the index server to crawl, but why you add this tag on home page and content page do you don't want to crawl that pages??

If you have access to your .htaccess file then there are plenty of methods how you can do this. Write this in your .htaccess file: redirect 301 /index.html/ http://www.yoursite.com

Bummer Wish you luck, though!

Alan, thank you for this response. I was completely off base thinking of the noarchive tag and that is what my response was geared towards. Your response is dead on, and I agree, adding the noarchive tag should be fine but it may send a weak signal to Google your site may be hiding something.

Not in a reasonable way. Search engines provide results based on matching content to the user's query. If a user searches for a term in English then you would need to provide that term on your page in order to rank for it. You would also need to optimize your page for that term (title, header tags, url, etc). You presumably have already done that for the English version of the site. If a user makes a search query using an English term, they presumably understand English and are seeking a website written in English. If a result was provided in another language that would be a bad user experience, the page would definitely have a higher bounce rate, and that may cause the rankings to drop.