Should question/challenge titles always be in English?

Question

There's some dispute over this challenge's title. The author originally created it as "Многочлены Чебышёва". A user edited it to "Chebyshev Polynomials" (an imperfect translation, but the translation commonly used in mathematics, and that is also used in the challenge body). A minor edit war erupted over the title. This meta post aims to solve this dispute, and any future disputes.

Pros

• Stack Exchange sites are in English (with a few exceptions - namely the foreign language Stack Overflow sites), so English-only challenge titles are consistent with the rest of the site.
• Having an English title makes it much easier to search for the majority of the userbase.

Cons

• English translations may be imperfect or ambiguous.

Note: this is not trying to address the usage of non-English words or characters when they are in common use in English (like loanwords or mathematical symbols).

Answer 1

By default, use English. With a reason, feel free to vary.

A good example of a challenge which uses some non-English is I programming puzzles, il code golf, which is a question about the usage of the definite article in Italian, and demonstrates the point of the question in the title. This title gives a good idea of the challenge, which would be hard to do without using some Italian.

In a situation like the one which sparked this question, where there is a non-English term you'd like to use, but a reasonable translation in English exists, a good option is to give both, to help more people understand the title. A good example of this is Conjugate in the Spanish imperfect / Conjugue en el imperfecto de indicativo

Finally, if there's something you want to ask about which doesn't survive translation well, try to also describe it in English a bit. For instance, if you're asking a question about drawing the Chinese character 臺, your title could be "Draw 臺, the first character of Taiwan", rather than simply "臺". This hypothetical title both needs to use some non-English, but also has some English to help people without the right font, help search terms, and provide clarification in general.

Answer 2

Questions titles should, by and large, use the English alphabet

This is not as strict as Mego's answer. It does not force titles into English, but does request that they are using transliterations or phonetics instead of other alphabets, to improve SEO.

Answer 3

Why not use both:

Chebyshev Polynomials/Многочлены Чебышёва

This is clear; the search will find it, and it has the original in case ambiguity is caused by transliteration.

Answer 4

Yes, question/challenge titles should be in English

We require question/challenge bodies to be in English (by virtue of being an English SE site), so there is good reason to have titles follow the same rule. In the specific case of the linked challenge, there is a translation that is commonly accepted (Chebyshev Polynomials) in the English-speaking mathematical community, and thus there is no good reason to use the original Russian name over the English translation. Non-English names are an obvious exception to the rule - proper nouns need not be "translated".

To quote Lynn:

any transliteration is more useful than a title most users can’t read. you write Chebyshev in the body text, anyway, so you’re just being obnoxious.

Answer 5

Titles should be non-disruptive

As we can see from the ensuing discussion, Многочлены Чебышёва is a controversial question title for a question about Chebyshev polynomials. The title received lots of unnecessary attention, which (I believe) flawr knew would happen. (Maybe they wanted to attract HNQ clicks?)

Contrarily, I don’t think anyone can disagree that Chebyshev Polynomials makes a perfectly appropriate title for a question about Chebyshev polynomials.

I don’t think language factors into the issue: if flawr had titled the question “¢нєвуѕнєν ρσℓуησмιαℓѕ”, or “Chebyshev Polynomials!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!”, I would have still complained and edited it.

Aside from the obvious SEO issues, I don’t think it’s good etiquette to attempt to draw attention to your question by picking an attention-seeking title. You don’t see people asking StackOverflow questions like “▶▶▶ JAVA NULLPOINTER EXCEPTION!!! ◀◀◀”, either. We are on the StackExchange network, where the norm is proper, descriptive, obvious English; deviating from that norm “for style” without needing to is disruptive.

Answer 6

The occasional title not in English isn't a big deal

I don't think any killer argument has been made that harm is done by having a small number of non-English titles. I'm discounting the various claims made that a non-English title harms search because no-one has been able to say how it harms search. In my experience whenever I'm trying to find a question I end up opening various questions from the search results to read them because the title is never sufficiently descriptive anyway.

Suppose we have a question with the title 𐎊𐎈𐎁𐎟𐎍𐎋𐎈𐎂𐎟𐎀𐎍𐎛𐎊𐎐 (chosen because I doubt that more than one or two people on the site read Ugaritic). In what contexts does the title appear?

• Search results. Already discussed.
• The main list of questions. Same conclusion as with search results: you have to open a question with an English title to figure out what it's really about, so there's no harm done.
• Automatic links in some contexts. Same conclusion.
• Hot network questions list. The conclusion is even stronger for two reasons: firstly, clickbaity titles are one of the most tried and tested ways to get and stay in the HNQ; and secondly, the HNQ already includes questions from non-English sites in the network. At worst people would say, "Oh, those code golfers are being silly again". Languages with -fuck in their names are a problem for HNQ, but unintelligible titles are par for the course.

The only thing which I think could be a problem is fonts which don't include the necessary characters: if the title is a series of boxes, that's pretty bad. This also means that because of the Unicode CJK unification debacle it may be best not to use Chinese, Japanese, or Korean in the title because it might render very differently for some users. But in moderation I see no problem with titles which have a justification for using another language, even in another alphabet, doing so.

Answer 7

No, They Should Not (with names)

In this case the name has some issues when translated to English. These issues are solved by simply keeping the name in the original language.