Japanese album but 99% of the track titles are English - What should the language be?

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? :slight_smile: 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.

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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.

You can use them to filter edit searches for releases in a certain language, or to exclude certain languages.

Open edits for Japanese releases

But you can’t actually filter down to the appropriate level - see Japanese album but 99% of the track titles are English - What should the language be? - #13 by yindesu

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 :slight_smile:

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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 :slight_smile:

This isn’t true per your guidance for non-Classical releases: How to enter a release with multiple languages? - #2 by reosarevok

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 :slight_smile:

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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” :slight_smile:

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It’s right in the premise of Japanese Style:

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.

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Yes, that’s been stated elsewhere:

Tracklist type One language, one script “Multiple languages/multiple scripts” Proposed “All languages and scripts”
Original (Japanese) Japanese/Japanese [Multiple languages]/[Multiple scripts] Japanese+English/Japanese+Latin
Transliterated (romanized) Japanese/Latin [Multiple languages]/Latin Japanese+English/Latin
Translation (English) English/Latin English/Latin English/Latin

One of these 3 columns would be more useful than the others when implementing a software feature to select a user’s preferred language and script using an API.

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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).

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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).

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You would like to use work aliases as a useful fallback because nobody will add aliases to millions of recordings, just for tagging. :wink:

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.

this is what I’ve already been doing, honestly…

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Yes me too, but recently I see more editors who will not something do if not in the guidelines, indeed.
Which maybe is a good thing.

What do you think of this update, @reosarevok?

I don’t think there is a reason to limit language and script to only track titles.
The guidelines was written before Aust credit existed, so it was just not possible to Latinise the artists.

If someone new to the site didn’t follow the guidelines they’d likely receive a message from an editor telling them they are doing everything wrong. While “If several languages are used in the titles, choose the most common language.” is still the guideline then I’m sticking to it, people can get pissy all they want because I’m fed up of editors saying we are doing it wrong even though it’s an [official style guideline].

Maybe ask the Japanese music industry to write their track titles in, I don’t know, Japanese because some members here don’t like following rules some people try to adhere to.

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But the “Japanese” tracklists and front covers of both your examples are majority English, unless I’ve gone blind.

Just because you don’t like the guideline doesn’t mean it should be ignored otherwise what’s the point of following any of them.

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