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

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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Best way to handle this would be to have another field (if pseudo-release is the release type) where you can select either “transliteration” or “translation”. Having English/Latin for all three tracklistings isn’t a problem if you can have original titles/transliteration/translation metadata as well.

We used to have that and it was removed because it’s often not as clear-cut as that, with some official transl(iter)ations doing both things at the same times to different tracks for example.

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Oh well anyway maybe Picard shows which one is original and which one is pseudo?
Then ok.

But still the words release and artist credits should be added to track titles in the guidelines, IMO.

I don’t think you’re supposed to add pseudo-releases that just change artist credits if the tracklisting doesn’t need changing. I think I’ve seen merges for this before. Maybe an exception if the credit can’t be set by using aliases (using a different name or foreign AC separators like と), but otherwise it feels like there’s no need for that. Title is already accounted for in the guidelines.

I prefer original and I am not a tagger myself but I thought Latin taggers would not like having release title, artists and 2 track titles in Japanese script.

It’s already handled by an option in Picard that allows for translating artist names using aliases for a given locale, usually English. So, there’s no need for pseudo-releases if the artist credit is the only thing that should be changed for someone who doesn’t want Japanese characters. Unless there’s some kind of alternate name or certain AC separators used, there’s no need for it.

That’s probably why the guidelines do not include artist credits for the language field. Not sure about pseudo-releases that only change an album title, though.

Which is not English (Takashi Ohmama), it’s Japanese language in Latin script.
But that’s another issue.

The discussion is over for me here anyway, thanks for your insights. :grin: