Style/Language/Japanese: Difference between revisions

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(→‎Japanese Language, Latin Script (Transliteration): westerner was vague and incorrect to this matter)
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For a proposed guideline to performing transliterations, please see [[User:Kepstin/Transliteration_Standard_Japanese|Transliteration Standard Japanese]].
For a proposed guideline to performing transliterations, please see [[User:Kepstin/Transliteration_Standard_Japanese|Transliteration Standard Japanese]].


The capitalization style used on transliterated (romanized) Japanese releases is designed to resemble the title-casing style used for English releases. Although official Japanese standards differ, these guidelines represent the most common capitalizations of romanized titles used by westerners. In particular:
The capitalization style used on transliterated (romanized) Japanese releases is designed to resemble the title-casing style used for English releases. Although official Japanese standards differ, these guidelines represent the most common capitalizations of romanized titles used by English speakers. In particular:


* The first word of a title should always have the first letter capitalized.
* The first word of a title should always have the first letter capitalized.

Revision as of 08:24, 20 April 2011


Status: This page describes an active style guideline proposal and is not official.



Proposal number: RFC-288
Champion: foolip
Current status: In development




Status: This is an official style guideline.

Note that these guidelines specifically apply to Japanese language releases. For western releases which have been released in Japan, please use the capitalization guidelines for the original language.

Japanese Language, Japanese Script (Kanji/Kana)

The Japanese script doesn't have any inherent capitalization. For releases originating in Japan, characters should be used as-is; with Kanji, Hiragana, or Katakana characters as used in the original titles.

Although the Japanese script has no capitalization, it is very common for Japanese titles to contain words in other scripts. Japanese artists have a tendency to choose capitalization and punctuation for aesthetic reasons; and to be very consistent regarding case over all releases. For this reason, words in the Latin script on a Japanese release should be in the same case as on the album art (or other available sources, such as official discography or record label pages), and not be normalized.

Japanese Language, Latin Script (Transliteration)

For a proposed guideline to performing transliterations, please see Transliteration Standard Japanese.

The capitalization style used on transliterated (romanized) Japanese releases is designed to resemble the title-casing style used for English releases. Although official Japanese standards differ, these guidelines represent the most common capitalizations of romanized titles used by English speakers. In particular:

  • The first word of a title should always have the first letter capitalized.
  • Proper nouns (names) should have the first letter of each word capitalized.
  • Any honourifics or suffixes to a proper noun should be in lowercase.
  • Every other word should have the first letter capitalized, except:
  • Particles (1-2 mora long): wa, ga, o, ni, de, e, to, mo, ka, ya, kara, made, yo, ne, etc. Particles on Wikipedia
  • Any words written using Latin characters in the original title should maintain the same capitalization as originally used.
  • In certain cases, Japanese words may be written in Katakana for emphasis. A common way to indicate this in transliterations is to use ALL CAPS. This use is discouraged.