According to the Transliterations Style guidelines here,
“only the first letter of each sentence and proper nouns should be capitalized”
Why are titles for the transliterated releases not allowed to have “Title Case” capitalization?
All sources/stores (Spotify/Apple Music/YouTube) that use Latin as the script uses Title Case (even if it’s a different release). To my knowledge, conversion from Bengali/Hindi/Arabic/Korean and many more scripts to Latin use Title Case for titles and Sentence case for sentences, as you’d expect it with Latin languages (ignoring exceptions).
As I understand, the original point of having a transliterated track listing is so that anyone who can’t read/write the original language can still understand it. And now that there’s Picard and API which is read by countless other apps, the importance of transliterated titles is getting more critical. However, I feel this styling decision does not make any real difference and should use “Title Case” capitalization as the default styling.
What are the reason behind this decision and what if any should counter against my points?
I’m not sure that this is so consistent among languages that use the Latin script. English uses title case (e.g. “This Is the Title”) for titles, but many Romance languages use something closer to sentence case (e.g. “This is the title”): Spanish, French, Italian, Portuguese
Since this is transliteration (rather than translation), they wouldn’t be able to understand it, but rather just (roughly) pronounce it, right? Using the example from the Chinese guidelines, this is just about whether you’d transliterate 八度空間 as Bā dù kōngjiān vs. Bā Dù Kōngjiān when using Pinyin. When I look at that release group, the transliterated-using-Pinyin pseudo-release uses sentence case but the translated-to-English pseudo-release uses title case, as I’d expect.
If there are transliteration methods that have particular capitalization rules that differ from sentence case, they probably just need their own exceptions in the guideline.
Sure, they might understand (the pronunciation) it just fine from whatever the case is, but that wasn’t really what I meant to say.
Take my experience, the reason I even opened this thread. I use Picard to organize my library. Now I can read Latin and Bengali, I can even search using both Latin and Bengali script, but let’s say I have a song with a script I can’t read/write, in my library which do not have a Latin name, so I need to use the transliteration to be able to identify the track. Now sure I can use the digital release to get the Latin name, but that’s not the right release with the right information anyway. So I go for the transliteration, but it has no title case and looks ugly among other tracks in the library.
I meant when anything is transliterated from Bengali to Latin, it uses Title Case; same for Hindi, Arabic, etc. I wasn’t talking about other languages which already uses Latin script.
Also, the whole point of using a whole release for transliteration feels like a waste of data to me. A better way IMO would be using a simple database relation on the track list itself to add the transliteration to the release. It’ll not create almost empty/useless pseudo releases saving relationship resources, except only the track/album titles will have transliteration tags. Sounds more efficient to me.
