As mentioned on STYLE-881, Portuguese guidelines do not specify what to do with track titles that include parentheses. This leads to questions on titles like Você me vira a cabeça (Me tira do sério) which could be capitalized as “Você me vira a cabeça (Me tira do sério)” or as “Você me vira a cabeça (me tira do sério)”.
I’m not a Portuguese speaker, so I won’t claim to know how this should be done, but I generally like the option used in the Estonian guidelines for these cases:
The first word of an alternative title in parentheses should be capitalized
If the parentheses do not contain an alternative title, but a continuation of the preceding phrase, it shouldn’t be capitalized
So that would be my preferred choice if that makes sense in Portuguese (it does in Spanish, which is close, but) But I’m hoping to see actual Portuguese speakers give their opinions here!
While Portuguese people are here, there’s also STYLE-493 proposing to move towards a more English style of uppercase for everything except prepositions and whatnot, as per the Portuguese Wikipedia, if that’s considered more appropriate.
Well, my opinion it’s that parentheses in titles should be used exceptionally to extra title information, using a comma or a colon to separate these parts of the title.
As I know that brackets are language graphical resource and it’s not possible to leave it exclusively for that, I believe that it’s acceptable following rules that we already applies to other languages.
I agree that the first letter of the first word should be capitalized inside of the parentheses. “Você me vira a cabeça” and “Me tira do sério” are two different sentences, it makes no sense to use the second example.
As for the new style proposition, I definetely prefer the Wikipedia guidelines, it’s what I use to tag brazilian songs on my library.
But in these cases, what’s in parentheses it’s also part of the title. Unless it was officially separated by a comma or colon, it shouldn’t be changed.
Hi @reosarevok! As a Portuguese speaker, I agree with what you’re suggesting for the use of parentheses (that is, first words of alternative titles capitalized; continuations of the preceding phrase uncapitalized).
As for the change in style, I’m not sure that consulting Portuguese speakers will help, seen that this is kind of controversial for us. In my experience, people largely prefer it the way Wikipedia does, with an “Englishized” style; however, formal guidelines like the ones issued by ABNT (Brazilian Association of Technical Standards) and such suggest that the correct way is the one used on Musicbrainz’ guidelines at the moment.
Personally, I agree with and support the way it is now.
b. if the two parts are not, (if they’re alternate titles; or they come from different parts of the song’s lyrics; or (though rarely) they’re separated by a period) then the first letter of the part in parenthesis should be capitalized.
this principle is simpler to apply when titles in a language are supposed to be in sentence case, as no other special capitalization rules apply aside from that for proper nouns.
As I said, it’s not something that I wanna change, and my request [STYLE-881] focus it’s only to standardize about using parentheses and the capitalization.
Can someone translate this into Portuguese so I can update the guideline?
The first word of an alternative title in parentheses should be capitalized. If the parentheses do not contain an alternative title, but a continuation of the preceding phrase, it shouldn’t be capitalized.
Also, does anyone mind if I remove the guess case bit? Using guess case will lowercase proper nouns, so it really isn’t a fireproof method to follow this by any means…
I think the idea there was that without the parentheses, that was assumed to be the case already - but I’m happy to get some wording that is more generic as long as it’s clear it applies to parentheses as well
A primeira palavra de um título alternativo entre parênteses deve ser escrita com inicial maiúscula. Se os parênteses não contêm um título alternativo, mas uma continuação da frase anterior, neste, não se deve utilizar inicial maiúscula.
Hijacking this to ask all our Portuguese speakers whether someone can help me with a support issue - the person seems to only speak Portuguese and not understand MB at all.
But I’m hoping to see actual Portuguese speakers give their opinions here!
