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Capitalization Standard For Transliterations

• Status: This is not a guideline, it merely explains how the StylePrinciple should usually be applied to transliterations in Pseudo-Releases.

In English

Transliteration is the conversion from one script to another. Latin to Kanji, Kanji to Cyrillic, Cyrillic to Hebrew, etc. There are many possibilities over many languages, some have capitalization and some don't. When a language with no capitalization is converted to one that does we need a standard for what capitalization to use.

Rationale

With the rise of globalization of the music world and the increasing influence of foreign music upon local music there are many chances of clashes between languages when music is imported. The problem gets worse when foreign languages directly influence music and words of a foreign script are adopted by a different language.

Between some languages such as the romantic languages the script of the language remains the same so there isn't my issue. But when languages of different scripts come together there can be irregularities. For example most eastern languages such as Kanji and Hangul don't have capitalization so we have no guide as to what the Romanized version would use for capitals.

Conventions

• Japanese to Latin

  • Common since Japanese adopt western words for increased popularity; it very possible that a Japanese release will be all in English or a mixture of Japanese and English. And with the popularity of anime in the western world Japanese converted to Latin titles are common. Common online method is to use Hepburn Romanization without the use of macrons for long vowels (Tokyo instead of Tōkyō) with the first letter of the title and of proper nouns capitalized.

• Japanese to Cyrillic

• Latin to Japanese

  • Japanese use Katakana for adopted or transliterated foreign words. There are no capitalization issues since Katakana has no capitalization.

• Cyrillic to Latin

• Latin to Cyrillic

• Hebrew to Latin

• Latin to Hebrew

Examples

• Japanese to Latin

• Latin to Japanese

Discussion

This is mostly based of discussions during voting and IRC chats; nothing is officially voted or set in stone, just current common convention. I just added the conventions I see most in my editing and voting. It's limited to Japanese and Latin English, I'm not familiar with conventions for other scripts. And it would probably make sense to move the examples up to the descriptions above; especially if the descriptions get too big. - Kerensky97

• Hi Kerensky97! I really don't why Japanese to Latin should get english capitalized? I agree putting caps on proper nouns but I don't see why at all it should be used on every word. I'm really against spreading this bad habit that often comes with many rules and exceptions as well. -- jesus2099 2008-07-22 06:29:23

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