Something I’ve been wondering that I would like to get confirmation for:
I run across quite a few Bollywood soundtracks, and most have been entered with “Caps On Each Word” (e.g.). However, my understanding is that, barring the presence of a specific language style guide (and artist intent), non-English releases should be entered using “Sentence” caps.
Could someone clarify for me?
For the record, I’m referring only to releases using Latin characters.
If there’s no guideline, they should mostly be entered either as-is, or as it’d be more correct in the language. I have no idea what capitalisation a Hindi user would expect! If we could get good enough feedback on that, we could actually make a guideline.
I am a Hindi speaker and so i consider myself eligible to comment on this issue.
Actually, there is not much significance of Capitalization of each word, but yes, mostly all of the releases follow this tradition. This can be visible from the songs uploaded on youtube
It gives a sense of familiarity, so i suggest to preserve the original format.
And there is no such specific rule that they follow, at least i haven’t heard of any.
What do official (or as close to as you can get) Hindi language guidelines suggest for titles?
The Danish language institute recommends sentence case, for example, while some of the major acknowledged English style guidelines recommend something similar to our style guidelines. A lot of Danish releases still capitalise every word on their cover though, but that does not mean it is correct Danish.
(Note that I have pretty much no familiarity what-so-ever with Hindi, so I’m not saying anyone is wrong, I’d just like a more informed background that just “personal experience”. )
Because transliterations can differ, what’s printed should be used in principle. So this should be mostly an issue for pseudo-releases unless Indian labels commonly print tracklists in Latin script.
This may be the case, but it almost certainly is so because of English being a very common language on the Internet. The guidelines for Japanese use this as a rationale for English-style capitalization. This could be used to support having similar guidelines for Devanagari transliterations, but I would rather change the guidelines for Japanese. I think sentence case would be the more neutral case when there’s no standard. Of course, one can argue against it inherently being more neutral, and any actual standards would be much better to use.
From the Japanese guidelines (I haven’t read the guidelines for other scripts ), we can gather some makeshift guidelines for Devanagari (which is the script used for Hindi, if I’m not entirely mistaken):
If it is an official release, use the tracklist as printed. This comes as a consequence of the next point.
If an official transliteration is available, use it.
The Wikipedia page links IAST, which is a “widely used standard”, and Hunterian transliteration, which is adopted officially by India. IAST is a subset of ISO 15919, which as an international standard should probably be preferred.
As for the actual question, I don’t have an answer I was hoping for one of the major transliterations to use capital letters in some other way, but it seems none of them define a case standard (from what I can read on Wikipedia). You could search for usage online, but I suspect you would find English title case mostly from the context.
I’d also use Sentence caps for transliterations, of pretty much every language. the Capitalize Every Word thing is (presumably) inherently English-English. Most other languages has Sentence case or Capitalize only specific Words like Nouns.