Should translated titles be captured?

[acli]

Are there any guidelines on capturing translated titles (e.g., as described in CMOS17 14.99 or APA7 9.38)? Should there be an element in the schema that captures such information?

[sdruskat]

Thanks @acli for this issue, it's an interesting question!

I'm not sure who in practice usually supplies translated titles.

I think I have done it perhaps once or twice myself in the past, for papers that reference German language publications for which I had translated the title myself, so one use case would be citer adds translation. In this case I think the schema wouldn't need such a field. The citer would simply add their translation in the metadata format they are using for the work they want to cite the translated work in.

By the way, it seems to be a matter of debate whether translating titles is good research practice (e.g., see comments in this TeX StackExchange post), although personally I see why they can be useful in some contexts.

Another use case could be provider of work adds translation. I'm not sure if this is a common use case especially for software (and datasets). It may be for works that go in the references section, but this information may also be lost downstream anyway - BibTeX for one doesn't seem to natively support translated titles (as far as I could find out). Instead, BibTeX must be "hacked" (see link to TeX SE above) to work. One could also argue that if software/dataset creators want to supply a translated title, they can simply use the title field and add the translation in square brackets or another format of their choosing, making it part of the title itself.

[acli]

I just read the StackExchange post and wanted to just jot down some thoughts:

It is not known what the OP’s discipline was; all we know is they cite in APA style, which suggests they likely did not work in math, engineering, or medicine (where some kind of Vancouver style would be more common). For what it’s worth, APA has never had good support in BibTeX.

It is also not known what disciplines the commenters work in, or why they felt translated titles were bad academic practice. As one dissenting commenter stated, numerous examples with translated titles can be found in the Chicago Manual of Style (including CMOS17, the current edition). APA also does not discourage translated titles (9.38 specifically, if we’re talking about APA7, the current edition). MLA (1.2.5 specifically, for MLA8, the current edition) actually tells people to provide translated titles “if your readers are unlikely to understand the title of a non-English work”. APA, CMOS, and MLA happen to be precisely styles not commonly used in math, engineering, or medicine.

Since I’m not a researcher, I’m not qualified to further comment on whether translated titles are acceptable practice in some disciplines, but I don’t feel “it’s not supported by BibTeX” is a strong argument for not capturing this information. If the Ruby library is ever updated to include other styles – particularly Chicago style where the original and translated titles are separated by a delimiter other than an opening square bracket ­– this will become a problem because there will be no way to determine if any square brackets are part of the original title or if they introduce a translation.

We might want to re-examine our rationale for tying CFF so closely to bibtex:

• Are we assuming that everyone who might want to use CFF will write papers in LaTeX?
• Are we assuming that everyone who might want to use CFF must be working in math, engineering, or medicine? (This is false – for one, no one from my university works in math, engineering or medicine. The designer of the Ruby library obviously also thought this was false since they included support for APA style.)
• Are we consciously or subconsciously excluding people we stereotypically don’t think would write code, such as artists or designers?

(FWIW, I graduated from an art school and we do produce code. My department mostly cites in APA, the rest of the university mostly cites in MLA. Use of LaTeX is virtually non-existent. If we thought citing art is a possibility, we should face the reality that some art pieces will be or contain code. Do we want artists to use the citation file format?)