“unless most of the titles are in other languages, Japanese is probably the best choice”
The guideline implies that Japanese is not right choice here. Also, the language part of the guidelines does not concern artist credits at all.
I think it would probably be easier to make Picard display disambiguations and put “Latin transliteration” or something similar on the pseudo-release. I don’t know how multiple tracklistings will be implemented, but the guidelines can be rewritten for that.
The purpose of the field is for specifying the language/scripts the release is primarily using, not disambiguation, I always thought.
That’s all true but the style guide says it’s only for track titles. If we want do do it another way that’s fine but then the style guidelines should be changed to match.
If the purpose of release language/script isn’t to allow software to (easily and clearly) pick the track titles most appropriate for the user’s preferred language and script, then I’d vote for dropping these columns from the database entirely. Why track non-audio metadata that isn’t useful to anybody?
It’s not like Picard even uses language/script as-is - PICARD-2270 - so this change would just make it even less feasible for language preferences to be implemented in a way that makes sense if editors will say a tracklist contains multiple languages and multiple scripts.
I’m confused - for a Japanese user, the most appropriate tracks would probably be a transl(iter)ation of the whole release into Japanese, which would appropriately be marked as Japanese/Japanese, wouldn’t it? In the same way an English only user would want English/Latin. As such, that would be easier with multiple languages - right now, the Japanese and English combo would be shown as Japanese/Japanese with your method so they wouldn’t be able to find their transl(iter)ation.
No, a Japanese user would expect the original titles as intended for Japan.
The result of your desired language/script values and the implementation of STYLE-420 is that it won’t be possible for a user to say they prefer the 100% English translation of a Japanese release or the 100% romanized tracklist of a Japanese release because the original Japanese tracklist will contain both Japanese script and Latin script.
I’m not sure why we assume only Western Latin speakers are ever interested in translations and transliterations. Seems kind of a weird claim? “Only dumb English speakers care about titles in their language” or something? I’m sure there are Japanese users whose English is not great and would like a version that had the titles in Japanese, even if there’s fewer of them than the other way around. Obviously, if they just want to always use the original titles, then they don’t need to use any transl(iter)ations at all and they can just use the official release, so there’s no trouble
Obviously, if they just want to always use the original titles, then they don’t need to use any transl(iter)ations at all and they can just use the official release, so there’s no trouble
I’m not sure why we assume only Western Latin speakers are ever interested in translations and transliterations. Seems kind of a weird claim? “Only dumb English speakers care about titles in their language” or something? I’m sure there are Japanese users whose English is not great and would like a version that had the titles in Japanese, even if there’s fewer of them than the other way around.
I never made any claims about anybody’s intelligence and would appreciate the Style Leader of this community to not shove such offensive words into somebody else’s mouth. I’m simply talking about what the average user would expect the API to be capable of.
Sigh. Ok, that’s true for all except classical, and if the person in question really wants the “original titles” when that just means “Symphony in C / Symphonie en Ut / Sinfonía en do” (which is pretty much entirely useless) then this might not be a good fit, but then nothing is
It really feels that the average user of the API would probably expect something to says “Japanese” as the language to be mostly in Japanese, something that says “English” as the language to be mostly in English, and something that says “English + Japanese” to have both. The title of this field is “language”, not “locale” or “official tracklist for country X”
Japanese artists have a tendency to choose capitalization and punctuation (and language) for aesthetic reasons, and to be very consistent regarding case over all releases.
If you add a pseudo-release with the track “祝福” transliterated as “Shukufuku” and another one translated as “The Blessing”, would the first one be Japanese/Latin and the second one English/Latin? I’m not sure I get how this would work.
I don’t really care because I don’t tag but I guess we should be able to always select original tracklists over any language setting (pseudo-releases).
Why don’t we make use of recording name aliases more. Then have aliases for the different locales added there. That probably would avoid the need for pseudo releases in many cases.
Of course Picard would need to be extended to make use of recording aliases (and maybe the MB web service, if it is not already easy to include recording aliases in lookup results).
Nowadays there are more and more editors really strictly applying guidelines.
We could just add to this guidelines that the release language and script are not only for the track titles, but also for the track artist credits and for the release title and for the release artist credits.
In the same way an English only user would want English/Latin. As such, that would be easier with multiple languages - right now, the Japanese and English combo would be shown as Japanese/Japanese with your method so they wouldn’t be able to find their transl(iter)ation.