On Wednesday 20 November 2002 12:59 pm, wikipedia-l-request(a)wikipedia.org
wrote:
The biggest fallacy with this is what we mean by
"most widely used".
Some are fairly obvious. No-one would reasonably that an article in
English about Rome, Italy should appear under "Roma". Still, the entire
set of these obvious cases is only a small subset of the entire body of
articles that could have this problem.
Then lets use the obvious cases without argument and focus on the less than
obvious cases. Searching only pages in English on Google is a useful mostly
objective tool that can be used in these situations. BTW, my understanding is
that Lir et al. /are/ arguing for having the article on Rome at [[Roma]].
This is just following their logic.
When you try to translate everything the very real
risk is that you end
up using a form that nobody recognizes. If a name is not widely known,
we should be favouring the original language form, with standard
transliterations when that is applicable. With novels and movies we
should be favouring the original language title; there is no way that we
should be attempting the translation of titles that have never been
produced in English translations. Whether the title of Camus's novel
"L'Étranger" should be the literal "The Stranger" or the
metaphorical
"The Outsider" is a matter of literary debate that is well beyond the
scope of this encyclopaedia. Using the original title for the main
entry avoids that problem completely.
I use the word "favour" carefully since a one rule fits all policy will
never work. Nobody has ever used the English title for "La Dolce Vita"
while the movie "Wo hu cang long" is only known by its English name.
Eclecticology
Eh? The current Anglicization naming convention does not at all in any way
require translation when the native form is most widely used in English.
It would be totally wrong and stupid to have the article about Les Misérables
at [[Poor wretches]] because English speakers would not recognize the
translated title as the book/film title.
So if a native form is the one most widely know and used by English speakers
then by all means lets use the native form. All that matters is what is most
useful to the greatest number of English speaking users.
-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)