Locale for pinyin aliases of Chinese artists — en, zh-Latn, or something else?

Quick question on alias locale conventions for Chinese-language artists. I’d like to check community consensus before adding more at scale.

Two cases:

1. Artists with a real English name (chosen by the artist, not a direct transcription) — e.g. Faye Wong (王菲), Jackie Chan (成龍). These are clearly locale=en, primary for locale. Correct?

2. Artists with no English name, only pinyin transcription — e.g. 陈劲 → “Chen Jin”, 侯牧人 → “Hou Muren”. What’s the preferred locale?

  • en (treat pinyin as the English-readable form)?
  • zh-Latn / cmn-Latn (pinyin is a romanization of Mandarin, not English)?
  • No locale at all (just an artist-name alias)?

Raised because a recent edit of mine was questioned — the point being that pinyin isn’t English, and if we tag it en we’d logically have to tag it for every Latin-script locale too. Makes sense to me, but I’d like a clear answer before continuing.

Thanks!

My first thought was that for people like Jackie Chan, locale=en makes sense, but in the end that’s more of a worldwide name for all languages written in the Latin script rather than a specific English one. The main difference with the second case is that it is not a transliteration, but (at least partially) a chosen name. Wouldn’t ‘Chinese Latin’ (as it appears in the locale list, I don’t know the code for that) and the alias type ‘artist name’ make more sense?

For the second case I’d use ‘Chinese Latin’ as well, and it might make sense to add a new alias type ‘(unconfirmed) transliteration’.

There is a ticket for adding a ‘script’ attribute for aliases, but that is not likely to happen soon: https://tickets.metabrainz.org/browse/MBS-5192.

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Yes!

For questions 1 and 2:

If we could have a Latin alias, it would be even better than having to set duplicate aliases for all Latin based languages (English, French, German, Italian, Spanish, etc.).
But we don’t have Latin aliases, yet.

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Thanks — good, case 1 = en it is. Faye Wong, Jackie Chan, anything with a clear source showing it’s their English name → en.

For pinyin, since we don’t have Latin aliases yet, we’ll just go with cmn + Latn for now and swap over if/when that changes.

Thanks for the pointer to MBS-5192 — hope it lands soon so the script attribute can clean this up properly!

I didn’t find this in the Locale list, but I found Chinese Latin zh_Latn!
Wow, it’s great!
So the addition of Latin script in Locales has started, @reosarevok?
But Japanese Latin ja_Latn (?) is not available yet.

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Not specifically - simply zh_Latn is itself a locale in the list we use.

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