Non English tags, redux

Question

The meta question here gives good reasons why tags should be in English, but the discussion does not cover works that were in a foreign language to begin with. I think this is an edge case that needs to be clarified.

If someone wants to ask a question about such a work, should the corresponding tag be the original title, or an English translation of that title? What if it's a bad translation into English? What if there are several? Which one should be used?

This was triggered by my attempt to tag my latest question about a French TV show with its original title. I needed to vent a little on chat when the grave accent è in the tag name was converted to a plain e. @Jenayah referred me to the meta question linked at the top. I wasn't really sure that covered this case.

An extreme case would be the weird 1991 Soviet adaptation of The Lord of The Rings, Хранители (transliterates as Khraniteli). Google Translate renders it as "Keepers", Wikipedia as "Keepers of the Ring", but I was told it translated directly to "Guardians". I can't imagine any other tag than khraniteli. Anything else would detract from its "specialness".

I think that rather than a "tag in English", we might have to go for "tag the best-known title".

Answer 1

You can't just take a foreign word and respell it to "look English."

Let's get the specific example out of the way first: "la-derniere-vague" is neither English nor French. French considers the grave accent on è to be mandatory, so "derniere" is a misspelling according to French orthography (and there's no such word at all in English). There are only two strings that could possibly be valid tag names here:

• la-dernière-vague
• the-last-wave

The question is, which of those two names should we use?

In general, tag names should favor English where it is reasonable to do so, because we are an English-speaking site and tags can only have one true (displayed) name. This issue has been discussed at length and I don't think it would be appropriate to re-litigate it here. Tag synonyms can take care of people typing a different name, so this should not be too much of an inconvenience, anyway.

On the other hand, there may be some cases where the English name is problematic, for example because it is ambiguous (many adaptations under the same name) or poorly-recognized. It might be appropriate, on a case by case basis, to make exceptions in recognition of these problems. I am not going to attempt to set out specific rules for determining when those exceptions should be made, except to say that the tag should actually be an official name of the work (or an official translation thereof). If a work was never translated into English, then use its non-English title, because that is the only title which is unambiguously correct.

As for transliteration of non-Latin alphabets... I have no idea. That's a more complicated topic and it would probably be better to address it separately. Certainly, tag synonyms should exist between the Romanized and original spellings, assuming the tag is popular enough for anyone to bother with setting them up. As for which one should be primary (assuming there's no reasonable English name), I would suggest picking the name which is more likely to be recognized by a larger group of people, and take it to meta in cases of disagreement on specific works.