Is rel=canonical needed in same content pages with translated titles?

Question

For each page I have several versions, one per language. Each has its own links:

mydomain.com/page
ja.mydomain.com/page

Both display the same content, with the headers translated to a different language. Each page also has in the header

  <link rel="alternate" hreflang="en" href="http:/mydomain.com/page" />
  <link rel="alternate" hreflang="jp" href="http://ja.mydomain.com/page" />

I've read that there's no need for rel=canonical in pages in different languages, however because I'm only translating the titles and there is still a lot of duplicate content (UGC) I'm concerned about this.

Should I add a ref=canonical?

Answer 1

You should not use rel=canonical, because such an attribute is primarily a Google thing, and Google says: “The rel="canonical" attribute should be used only to specify the preferred version of many pages with identical content (although minor differences, such as sort order, are okay).” Pages that have titles in different languages differ much more than trivially: the language used in a title is an essential component of understandability.