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

[Philip Jägenstedt]

There is a RFC for this on the MB-style list now for anyone
interrested: http://lists.musicbrainz.org/pipermail/musicbrainz-style/2007-September/005168.html

I don't agree with kuno that the current style guides allow the kinds
of sort names that are widely in use. If the emphasis is indeed to be
on 'Latin script' and not on transliterated then 'transliteration'
should be changed/removed, as "Jay Chou" is not a transliteration. I
simplified my suggestion a bit after some feedback so do check out the
style list if you're interrested.

Philip

On 9/16/07, Kuno Woudt <kuno at frob.nl> wrote:
> 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.
>
>
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