History talk:Release Language

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ReleaseLanguage talks about "the language of the release title and track titles". However it doesn't go into any more detail on this. Is it the language as seen in a CD booklet (for example)? Can you translate titles? See http://musicbrainz.org/show/edit/index.html?editid=6395545 for an example.


Both Transliterations and Foreign Compilations seem to be a problem.

In the official Documentation it says:

  • If several languages are used in the titles, choose the most common language. For releases where there's an equal mix of two or more languages and hence no obvious answer, 'Multiple Languages' may be the best choice. But remember that it is quite common for languages to borrow words and phrases, and so "Je ne sais quoi" in an English title does not make something multiple languages, nor do a few English words in a foreign language title. (Some languages borrow quite extensively, and especially for Japanese, unless most of the titles are in other languages, Japanese is probably the best choice.) In some cases, the release and track titles written on an release may include translations or transliterations.

This will be something that we have to address; I'm not sure that 'Multiple Languages' is the best choice in this case, e.g. a Japanese release with English translation and transliteration into Roman script should be listed as 'English'. @alex

Should it not be listed as Language: Japanese, Script: Latin for a Latin transliteration of the release. And Language: English, Script: Latin for a translation into English? --DonRedman


What about releases like Het beste van Santana? The ReleaseTitle is in Dutch, the TrackTitles are in English and Spanish. Should the ReleaseLanguage be Dutch? --DonRedman

  • Why is there a need to list the language of track and release titles when you see their names? Isn't the language obvious then? This field can only be a source of confusion. There are far too many artists who perform in more than one language, but a 'Multiple Languages' doesn't really give any information at all. So, if this field has to stay, don't create too complicated rules which can't match any possible case anyway, let the user decide what they like most for their stuff. --Fuchs

Why not just allow multiple languages to be attached to an Release? That way the 'specialists' in all the languages concerned would see be able to search for all occurrences of their language(s). --Gecks


In the current rule the majority of the track languages rules and becomes the release language. I'm in favor of using the most correct term. Even if only one track on the release is in another language (not just the title, but a substantial part of the track), you should use 'multiple languages' because otherwise it doesn't do the release justice. E.g. the Twarres release "Stream" has got 9 tracks in English and 2 in Frisian. It would be ridiculous to make the release language English, according to the current rule. Gecks' suggestion would bypass this problem, but until then this is a Multiple Languages release. --Jay1978


There is a language missing from the dropdown list "Swiss German" ;-) --Keschte


Per a January 2008 mb-style discussion, it seems that the ReleaseLanguage value describes the language of the text in the ReleaseTitle and TrackTitle fields for this Release in the MusicBrainzDatabase. It doesn't describe the text on the physical release packaging giving the title of that physical release and its tracks, as written by the publisher, unless it happens to be the same as the language of the text in the MusicBrainzDatabase. I think it would be good to change the opening paragraph to make this point more clear. -- JimDeLaHunt 2008-02-01.