Frankly, I don't see how the title of any literary work or film - where the original title was in English so as to remove any possible translation issues - could be given as anything other than what it is. "The Twelfth Night"? "A Twelfth Night"? That's positively ludicrous. So would be saying "I went to see The Titanic." Did you take a dive into the North Atlantic? If not, you saw the movie, whose title is simply "Titanic." The idea that there could be any ambiguity here is preposterous. On the other hand, things do get testy when you're dealing with titles that are commonly shortened ("The Wealth of Nations") or altered ("Protocols of the Elders of Zion," which was accepted in the match I played), not to mention translations. With translations, though, it's my feeling that the most common English translation is what should generally be sought. Have you ever seen Gogol's story referred to in English as "An Overcoat?" I haven't. Ditto for "The War and the Peace." If it isn't published under that title in English, why should it be acceptable, even if technically you could make the case that it's possible to translate it like that? People who are going to be that anal about Russian's lack of articles should be forced to give the original Russian title. As for the newspapers, these really aren't titles in the same way that books or films have titles. As someone said earlier, you would say "I'm reading the LA Times" but not "I'm reading LA Times," but by the same token you wouldn't say "I just saw the Rollerball" (okay, so nobody would say they'd seen Rollerball anyway, but you get the idea). One thing that's for sure is that it probably shouldn't be left up to individual moderator discretion, even though in a lot of cases this is probably what ends up happening anyway. In that case it's totally a matter of what room you're in, and that's not how things should work. But a universal standard for titles may be tough to come by, so we may have to live with more or less the current system. Frankly, I can deal. Robert Flaxman Northwestern University Quiz Bowl
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