Chinese Notes

Notes on Chinese artists and releases in MusicBrainz

These are some notes about open issues and tips to editors/voters concerning the Chinese artists and releases in MusicBrainz. See also ChineseArtists and the Chinese section in TellSimilarLanguagesApart. Please contribute and comment at will!

Current state

There are roughly 1300 proper Chinese releases and somewhere around 450 ChineseArtists. Only the super-stars of Chinese music have fairly complete discographies, while many other well known artists have poor coverage or are missing completely. The number of active native Chinese editors are probably below 5 and including editors with Chinese as a second language won't change that number by much.

Romanization systems

Wikipedia covers romanization of Chinese in great depth, but a quick summary is in order.

Hanyu Pinyin (漢語拼音/汉语拼音) is the romanization system used in mainland China and is also an ISO standard for romanization of Mandarin Chinese. Students of Chinese will typically learn this system which probably why virtually all transliterated releases in MusicBrainz use it.

Mandarin Chinese is also the official language on Taiwan, but the official romanization system is Tongyong Pinyin. For political and historical reasons a mixture of systems are used, including Wades-Giles, MPS2 and Hanyu Pinyin. However, person names are usually based on Wade-Giles spellings, which is what you will see in the SortNames of Taiwanese artists. More details on Wikipedia.

Cantonese-speaking artists (Hong Kong, Macao, Guangdong) will typically not use any of the systems mentioned above, but rather a romanization based on Cantonese pronounciation.

Wikipedia's list of common Chinese surnames provides a very good overview of common family names and their romanization using different systems.

Futhermore, there are different standards for spacing and capitalization of romanized names. In mainland China the given name is typically written without spacing. In Taiwan and Hong Kong however, two-syllable given names are usually written with a hyphen between each syllable, sometimes also capitalizing the second.

It is also common for artists to choose their own "English" name or a non-standard romanization, so some should be taken before changing the sort names of Chinese artists with which you are not familiar.

Traditional and simplified Chinese

The current text search does no conversion between traditional and simplified Chinese, which has caused many duplicate artists to be entered (can be fixed with ArtistAlias) and lookup of releases with Picard to fail if they are in the wrong script. No bugs have been filed for this issue, which would be a first step.

Terminology

An incomplete list of common words and abbreviations used on covers and in liner notes.

• 曲/作曲: composer
• 詞/作詞/填詞: lyrics
• 編曲: arranger
• 編寫: arrangment; Example: 合聲編寫 (background vocal arrangement)
• 製作人: producer
• 錄音(工程)師: recording engineer
• 混音(工程)師: mixing engineer
• 合音/合聲/和音/和聲: background vocal
• 演唱: vocal (usually
• 主唱: lead vocal
• 合唱:
• CF: Commercial Film; Note that this ExtraTitleInformation normally doesn't belong in the title, but can be placed in an annotation. Example: 華歌爾2001年CF主題曲 (2001 Wacoal commercial tune)
• OT: Original Title

Style issues

Punctuation and spacing

Classic Chinese uses neither punctuation nor spacing, but modern Chinese has adopted the common punctuation from Latin scripts. However, they are usually used in their full-width forms.

Half-width	,	.	?	!	:	;	(	)
Full-width	，	。	？	！	：	；	（	）

Which form is used is currently very inconsistent in the database and depends on the preference of the editor.

There is also some inconsistency in how extra title information is formatted:

1. 標題（某某版） [full-width brackets]
2. 標題(某某版) [half-width brackets]
3. 標題 (某某版) [half-width brackets with leading space]

ExtraTitleInformationStyle only states that such must information "must be entered in parentheses after the MainTitle", which is true of all three above formats.

Artist collaborations

FeaturingArtistStyle requires the use of "藝人甲 (feat. 藝人乙)" for the typical featured artist case. This format is not completely alien to Chinese and does appear on some covers, but there are still some entries in the database using the "藝人甲 (藝人乙合唱)" format. I've been slightly hesitant to change them since the AR:s already show the relationship with great clarity and because "合唱" means "sing together" and thus implies vocal performance. This is a fairly minor issue, but should be put right in the future.

FeaturingArtistStyle does not clearly state how collaborations between 3 or more artists should be formatted. The de facto standard "Artist A, Artist B & Artist C" is seldom used for Chinese artists, for various reasons. This issue has been discussed on the style mailing list.

The collaboration artists in question:

• 范宗沛、彭靖、林海、鍾成虎、董運昌、楊錦聰 Fan Zong Pei, Peng Jing, Lin Hai, Zhong Cheng Hu, Dong Yun Chang, Yang Jin Cong
• 林海峰 & 陳浩峰 & 林一峰 Lamb, Jan & Chan, Ho-Fung & Lam, Chet
• 李宗盛 & 周華健 & 黃品冠 Lee, Jonathan & Chow, Emil & Wong, Victor
• 任賢齊 & 阿牛 & 光良 Ren, Richie & Ah Niu & Wong, Michael
• 任賢齊 & 黃品源 & 阿牛 & 李正帆 Ren, Richie & Huang, Pin Yuan & Ah Niu & Lee, Cheng Fan
• 张纪中 周华健 胡军 张纪中 周华健 胡军

Traditional Chinese Music

It's not obvious how ClassicalStyleGuide should be applied to traditional Chinese music. The use of English and Latin script in an otherwise Chinese context is sub-optimal. These are some releases with traditional Chinese music which may have style issues:

• 殤
• 三笑
• 山水響

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