User:Foolip/Capitalization Standard For Transliterations

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

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

Status: This is an official style guideline.

Transliteration is the conversion from one script to another, e.g. from Japanese to Latin or vice versa. Often, releases in non-Latin scripts will be transliterated for the benefit of people who enjoy the music but cannot read the original language. Transliterated releases should be capitalized and otherwise conform to the rules of the transliteration or romanization system used. What follows is specific guidance for languages which are often transliterated.

Chinese

While there are many romanization systems for Chinese, Hanyu Pinyin is the most common in MusicBrainz. In Hanyu Pinyin, only the first word of title and proper nouns should be capitalized. More detailed writing rules can be found in Basic Rules of Hanyu Pinyin Orthography.

Examples:

• Bā dù kōngjiān (Hanyu Pinyin transliteration of 八度空間)
• Wáng Fēi (Hanyu Pinyin transliteration of 王菲)

Japanese

The most common method used in MusicBrainz is 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.

Note: Japanese uses katakana to write foreign loan words and to transliterate foreign words. There are no capitalization issues since katakana has no capitalization.

Examples:

• Japanese to Latin
• Latin to Japanese