Commas and quotation marks (UK vs US style)

MusicBrainz Style
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Hello, I’d appreciate some feedback on a series of edits I made to a Harry Potter audiobook. Because it’s the US release, I adjusted the punctuation to match the standard US practice of placing commas inside the quotation marks, rather than outside them as is the norm in the UK (and probably everywhere else that uses these punctuation marks).

I entered these edits while tagging my own tracks from this audiobook yesterday. I’m from the US, so commas outside quotes look wrong to me, and I believe that most other US users of MusicBrainz probably feel the same way. That’s why I made the edits in MusicBrainz and not just in Picard on my own computer.

An editor has voted these edits down, citing the style guideline for audiobook track titles, presumably because the examples in that guideline all have their commas outside the quotes. But I would guess that those examples are written that way just because the person who wrote them was not from the US; I doubt that person intended to impose a particular style of comma placement on MusicBrainz users.

Am I wrong?

I should also note that I’ve followed the US comma convention when adding various US-released audiobooks to MusicBrainz in the past, and no one has objected.

EDIT: The edit search results link in my first sentence above is not working for me, and I don’t know how to make it work. If it doesn’t work for you either, just search for open edits to https://musicbrainz.org/release/385a4142-f373-4b2f-b25f-0c4637ced349

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This seems like something that would be very impractical to expect users to change from release to release (and what happens when a release is from a non UK or US country?)

To me it makes sense to pick one style, and stick with it, like we do with many others. Unless you get overwhelming consensus on changing it to the US style, the current style is the one to follow.

I imagine it should be pretty easy to do a MusicBrainz Picard tagging script to swap ," to ",?

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Fixed link: practik + edit medium + Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire

What browser are you using (me, VIvaldi)? It has changed your % characters in your URL by %25. It has URL encoded twice, instead of just once.

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For others reading this, editor is changing this:

Chapter 33: “The Death Eaters”, Part 5

to this:

Chapter 33: “The Death Eaters,” Part 5

The comma is not part of the quoted text. The comma is to separate the quote from the rest of the title.

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I’ve always been wondering about these quotes. Was it really the intention of the guideline to put literal quotes around the name of the chapter or are the quotes in the Chapter X: “Chapter Title”, Part N template only there to indicate that “Chapter Title” is a placeholder (whereas Chapter and Part are to be used literally)?

And if those quotes were intended to be used literally, why was this decision made? It always looked ugly to me.

I’ve never heard about a US style to put a comma, which separates a quote from the following text, inside the quotes, why would you do that?

Anyway, in my opinion the best clarification (or change) to that guideline would be to remove the quotes…

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I think the quotes may have come from some audio dramas that don’t so much have chapter titles, but quoted chunks of text. The Goons do it a lot. Hitch Hiker’s Guide is also an example of that. Each chunk of recording started with the first line of that part. I’ve also see it with Pratchett. Pratchett didn’t used to have Chapters in most of his books.

Though I seem to remember those recordings have had the quotes stripped out long ago. (Went to look for some examples, and could not find any still standing)

Agree it has always looked odd for Chapter Titles to be put into quotes. A chapter should be treated like a track name.

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What browser are you using?

Firefox. Thanks for the fix!

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Sorry to ping you @reosarevok, our benevolent style dictator, but this is a question that I’ve seen come up a few times over the years and it would be really good to get clarification! If you know/can remember :stuck_out_tongue:

re.

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Apologies for the length of this; I’m responding to everyone but Jesus:

Just to be clear, I’m not proposing that our audiobook chapter guideline should mandate US style. My preference would be to add a note stating that quotation marks should follow the conventions of whatever language the release uses. That would also address your question about releases from countries other than the UK and US.

Would it also be pretty easy to make a userscript to do the same in MusicBrainz itself? Sincere question; I don’t know the answer.

The quotation marks are also there to separate the chapter title from the rest of the track title, and it’s equally valid to view “,” as a set of punctuation marks that always appear together in that sequence. These are all just conventions, like how Spanish requires ¿? instead of ?, or how German requires ––, instead of ––. These things aren’t wrong just because other languages do things differently.

I’m not surprised you’ve never heard of it; you’re German, right? I don’t know how ,” became the US standard, but I would guess it was for reasons of typographic texture – the whitespace in s,” P, for example, is more evenly distributed than in s”, P, especially in non-monospaced type. If ,” is what you’re accustomed to, then you notice all those little gaps created by ”, and they bother you.

Who knows, but in prose writing – at least in English – if you cite the title of a book chapter, you put it in quotes to show that it’s a title, e.g.: ‘At the end of Chapter 33, “The Death Eaters,” Voldemort challenges Harry to fight him.’ Probably the idea came from there.

What do you mean by “literally”? Should we change Chapitre and Kapitel to Chapter in all the French and German audiobooks? :scream:

I know you don’t mean that, but this is an important question: Exactly how much of the language in the guideline is a placeholder, and how much is to be used literally?

You all seem to be saying that ”, belongs on the literal side of the dividing line. I would suggest that maybe you think that just because it looks right to you. I would put it on the placeholder side – because it looks wrong to me? Sure, probably.

But if it looks wrong to me, then it will look wrong to many other US-based users too, who are presumably more likely to be tagging US audiobook releases. So why not let them do it the way that’s correct for their language? Why not let people use «…» for French audiobooks and ”…” for Finnish ones and 「…」 for Japanese ones? Is that really a problem?

Or there’s also this solution :slight_smile: I guess things could get confusing if a book had chapter titles like “Part 1,” but that’s a pretty unlikely edge case.

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Which style would an audiobook from a Japanese company use, that retains the chapter English titles and does not have national rules for quotation marks/doesn’t use quotation marks in their script?

It seems complicated…

The quotation marks are an MB ‘invention’ - with no artist or label intent involved - and so imo it’s probably more important that it’s consistent and machine readable. Which I think may be another way of saying what IvanDobsky has been putting forward.

(all this assumes we are meant to use the quotation marks literally, anyway)

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Simple version - track titles for Music CDs are as on the printed track list. Should be the same for Audiobook track titles. (And is what I thought had been agreed)

If there quotes printed on the page, then use quotes. If there are no quotes, then don’t add them in. IMHO this is cleaner to read and more consistent with other parts of MB:

Chapter 33: The Death Eaters, Part 5

It also avoids the whole debate of comma inside or outside of the quotes.

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I don’t know, but the person who was actually entering this hypothetical release into MB probably would. Like IvanDobsky says –

– these things are usually not as complicated in practice as they can seem in the abstract.

That said, I’ve basically come around to the idea that we should just ditch the quotes. But it would still be interesting to know how they were intended. I looked up the history of the audiobook guideline and will ping one other person who might be able to help:

@LordSputnik, you wrote the guideline; do you remember what you were thinking 13 years ago when you put quotation marks around the chapter titles? Specifically:

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