#musicbrainz

the best I could think up would be suggesting that someone transliterates using one system, but not forcing it

since otherwise you get the French and Germans arguing about Tchaikovsky

(the english transliteration is semi-french)

on the wiki page, I actually wrote:

o If the name is unrecognizable e.g. it uses a non-roman character set (Cryllic, Kanji etc.) use the standard transliteration into roman characters if there is one.

+ If the artist's home country's language does not define a standard transliteration into roman characters (e.g. Pinyin, Japanese romaji, use the transliteration into English - transliterations into other languages may be different (e.g. Ч = Ch in english, but Ч = Tch in french).

mkoebele is now known as mkoebele|zzz

+ Note that common English spellings should be preferred, e.g. Tchaikovsky, not Chajkovskij.

what about when there are several ways to transliterate into english? (that's mostly what I'm thinking about)

this was just a political choice, and has an English-centric bias

if there are several ways, pick the "official" one (based on country)

(again, political)

does russian have an official one? I don't know

so a mainland Chinese artist would use Pinyin, a Taiwanese artist something else

note also that it would be different for Russia vs. Ukraine

it basically gets to the point that only experts could actually point to an authority

and everyone else just muddles along

me, I depend on google-fights

whichever variant gets the most hits...

what if both have the same number? (I've seen that for obscure stuff)

then I go by the more impressive website :-)

wikipedia has a good article on Russian to English transliteration: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transliteration_of...

and of the (four?) standards they mention, I would lean toward the UN version (as they claim it is used in Russia) or maybe the ISO (although that is surely the least readable)

dupuy: Japan has several major transliteration systems and the official one isn't th emost common

which is why I asked if there was a standard picked out of one of them

and with chinese artists, seems like 90% of the hk and tw ones have official english names instead of just romanized ones -_- Not sure if it's as prevalent on main land

Knio is now known as Knio-dinner

Knio-dinner is now known as Knio

is the wiki supposed to be in ISO-8859-1 or unicode? if that latter how should I file a bug report to have someone fix it so the server properly adds <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" CONTENT="text/html; charset=UTF-8"> to the header?

since right now pages like http://wiki.musicbrainz.org/wiki.pl?JapaneseArt... are set as iso-8859-1 and pasted in kana/kanji are getting translated by browsers into the unicode reference numbers so the source displays stuff like <li> <a href="http://www.musicbrainz.org/showartist...; (raico) instead of the actual kanji

and for some people like mo apparently not being translated and just resulting in hosed characters

if you're creating lists of artists in forum scripts might be fairly important to get that set right soon since it'll cause issues with some web browsers...

*foreign

dupuy: http://musicbrainz.org/showmod.html?modid=1345272 out of curiousity, where did you find them refered to as that?

asahi 12 girls... honestly, I don't remember - I'd guess that came out of some systran type machine translator like babelfish.altavista.com, although it doesn't translate it that way (any more?)

well

if you stick asahi 12 girls in google with quotes there are no hits

yep - tried that first :-)

without them the top hit is for the Ueto Aya and Bishoujo Club 31 show Girls A Go Go

which is on TV Asahi

Asahi being either a giant congomerate or a bunch of unrelated similarily named companies

I've never really checked

but there's TV Asahi, Asahi newspaper, and Asahi beer

*conglomerate

does it make any sense as a translation for 楽坊?

didn't paste right, my settings are on shift-jis

just google it and paste the google link

but the Japanese reading is Joshi Juuni Gakubou

see the mailing list

yes, saw your mail

since I wrote a message about the whole mess dealing with them there

what did you paste there though? my encoding settings ate it

if it's a chinese group, i would use that as their primary name, and merge the english/japanese entries into a single artist

(just the last two chars of the artist name in japanese)

ah

(what I had as Yuefang)

that's the Chinese reading I think

although not enough syllables

I remember puzzling over that one quite a bit

12 Girls Band is a literal translation

and what they release as in English

The Twelve Muses is a better and more poetic translation

starting with some misencoded gibberish, trying to match it up with google hits, etc.

breaking it down it's Girl's Twelve Music Priest

*Girls

so Muse seems to fit best. But they went with a simple "Girls Band"

http://www.google.co.jp/search?sourceid=mozclie... btw, that'd be asahi

if they release in english as 12 Girls Band, that's the best sort name

dupuy: Twelve Girls Band, actually, but yeah

yeah - that's a whole other issue

any idea if there are any Chinese speakers on that mailing list? I'm fairly certain which is the Simplified chinese reading and that that's the one for mainland china

but not 100%

it's hard enough getting eveyone to buy into the romanization of sortnames

i believe so, although scottt (Scott Tsai) really is more familiar with traditional chinese

lindestinel also reads/writes some chinese, I believe

well, I'm not entirely in favor of the romanizing either ^^; I wouldn't mind it except for the fact that it doesn't sort Japanese names in Japanese sort order

so I'd almost rather they were all listed at the end and hopefully sorted right there

well, the thing is, nothing I know of would do that either...

i think "hopefully" is the operative word

I think but am not certain that to some extent they're sorted in unicode order

yes, that's true

but unicode order != alphabetic order

for every alphabet it supports

" I think but am not certain that to some extent they're sorted in unicode in the correct Japanese order" <--- how that should have been

but yeah, would need to be able to label what language an artist's name was in

you would need some kind of crazy big collation locale to do it right for any non-roman script language

so that it knew how to sort it before could have a reasonable expectation of correct sorting

I imagine that unicode is "mostly" in the correct order, except for the exceptions

just like Cyrillic or Greek

but if you had it tagged as artist name in kanji plus romanized sort name and the whole tagged as Japanese

then you could have the db correctly sort those ones in a i u e o ka ki ku ke ko etc order

that could probably be done with a lot of smart coding and some custom collation locales

need to be able to tag artist names for language first

but what player would support that

yes, first things first.

dupuy: ? lilith sorts that way off the top of my head

for mp3 players

one of the things I want to do in the i18n wiki page is lay out a development plan

lilith = device? pc software?

mpl3 player program

hmm, that page crashed my browser... bad luck

don't have Japanese fonts installed?

anyhow, I'm sure they did quite a bit of work to make that happen, and don't expect many other non-jp s/w or players to do it

encoding is shift_jis

dupuy: well, that's for automatic sorting. if you have a romanized sort name it's pretty easy

I have unicode fonts, but some don't appear in mozilla, and some pages crash it (so I use konqueror for that)

so lilith sorts by pronunciation for kanji w/o romanization (or kana)?

most common reading

how does it do with the sorting of the cyrillic smiley faces? :-)

it may be taking advantage of some inherent order in shift_jis

perhaps

dupuy: I don't know, I've never tried. I rarely use it

I use foobar + search button

yeah, when there are enough entries, the alphabetic browsing gets slow

it's moderately useless already for MB

I sort of noticed that

when you have to jump through 150 pages to find the right one

i found it handy to find artists with bad sortnames, not much else

i just use the symbol page

but with music players browsing isn't hard if you use a decent file system layout and have it all sorted by path

check the first and last few pages

but if you have 20k+ songs in the playlist then searching is faster than browsing 90%+ of the time

or MB, with 200K+ albums, 2.5M+ tracks

yes, there's that too. But I don't expect most people to have 2.5M+ tracks on their network

don't know many with more than 100k and none with over 200k

so unless you're planning to go steal the last.fm servers or something it'd be hard to beat MB's track count for your personal music collection

dupuy: so to be absolutely clear - I should delete current mods merging English and Japanese versions of the same album and when I have the time can go on a spree adding all the exact same albums I already added in Japanese to the same artists romanized into English?

that's my opinion

dupuy: translitertion is prefered, correct? not translation.

dupuy: and should I add TRMs and disc IDs to those ones like I've been doing for the JP versions of them?

My feeling is that "Transliteration [Translation]" is sort of the best

but I would not object to en: versions of albums with only one or the other

well, mostly have been adding TRMs, just a few disc IDs. always a pain to go get out the actual CD for sticking it in the drive for 3 seconds

the idea is to get as much of the translation data as possible

dupuy: well, I'd be more likely to transliterate than translate

there's a trick for inserting disc ids from the track info

since a lot of things that sound fine in Japanese are absoluely horrible and corny in English

so true of every language

dupuy: well, I could make a cue sheet, mount that on a virtual drive, and then submit off that

one of the tricks of translation

but that seems like a bit more work than going and getting the actual disk

dupuy: well, you can name a Japanese song LOVE LOVE Shine

in English like that

and it's okay

but if you actually named an English song LOVE LOVE Shine it sounds bad...

(especially when it gets capitalized to Love Love Shine) - I've been meaning to write up another RFE for a CopyDiscID moderation

question on capitalization - Japanese tends to be very consistent with their capitalization abuse of English in titles across releases