[mb-users] Artist sort names for non latin scripts

[Kuno Woudt]

On Sat, Sep 15, 2007 at 10:33:59PM -0700, Kerensky97 wrote:
> 
> Actually as I've always understood the sortname it's already supposed to be
> as Philip describes it.  周杰倫 is Chou Jie Lun, the sortname is basically a
> direct transliteration, so if you (correctly) pronounce the sortname a
> native speaker would know you're saying the same thing as the Kanji/Cyrillic
> script.  

But that is the whole problem.  A transliteration tries to map sounds of
one language onto the sounds of another language, that is usually not
very accurate -- whichever translatiteration system was chosen.  If you
donn't know chinese and try to pronounce 'Chou Jie Lun', a native
speaker may understand you if you're lucky, but it's also very likely
that he/she has no idea what you're trying to say :).   

If I understand the situation correctly chinese has the added complication 
that the chinese characters are used by various languages and dialects, 
many of which will have a different pronounciation for the characters.  I 
think for an artist coming from hong kong, you would want a transliteration
which matches the cantonese pronounciation, as that is closer to how the
artist would pronounce his/her own name.  For many other regions, a
transliteration which matches mandarin pronounciation would be better.

Another example, in a language I am a little more familiar with:
http://musicbrainz.org/artist/d1eb9201-f7fb-401f-b433-3a7316f7e814.html
이정현 uses 'Lee Jung-Hyun' on many of her album covers, especially
on her non-korean releases - and she never uses any other
transliteration of her name.  A more accurate transliteration would be 
'I Jeong-hyeon' or 'I Chŏnghyŏn', which many of her international fans
would not recognize.  The family name 'Lee' can be transliterated in a 
whole bunch of ways:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lee_%28Korean_name%29

If the sortname was purely used for sorting this would not be such
a big issue I believe.  But currently the sortname is overloaded to be
THE latin script version of the name in the musicbrainz interface and
when using picard.


I think current practice on musicbrainz is to use whatever international
transliteration the artist uses themselves, even if the transliteration
differs significantly from the name in his/her native language, as is
the case with 'Jay Chou'.  I also think the current practice is in line
with the SortnameStyle guideline, which only says this:

  'All ArtistSortNames should be in Latin script. For Japanese, Chinese,
   Greek, etc. ArtistNames this means they have to be transliterated.'

The emphasis being on 'Latin script', not on transliterated.

--kuno.