User:Silentbird/Style/Language/Chinese

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In English

Han script

Chinese characters, also known as Han characters, have no capitalization.

In general, there is a difference between spoken Chinese and written Chinese. All variants of spoken Chinese use Chinese characters to convey meaning, but how each Chinese character is pronounced is different due to dialectic differences. In MusicBrainz, Mandarin Chinese, Yue Chinese and Min Nan Chinese refer to different forms of spoken Chinese. These forms of spoken Chinese might have slight vocabulary differences (similar to how Scottish English sometimes uses "wee" as opposed to "little"), but the script they correspond to must either be Han Simplified (hans) or Han Traditional (hant). Han (hanzi, hanja, kanji) should only be used when the script is unclear.

Simplified and traditional Chinese characters

There are two schemes of Chinese characters currently in use: simplified Chinese and traditional Chinese. Simplified Chinese is used predominantly in mainland China, Malaysia and Singapore, whereas traditional Chinese is used mainly in Hong Kong, Macao and Taiwan. Editors should follow the scheme used by the release. Normally, characters from one scheme is not used together with the other; exceptions to this rule should only be made to respect artist intent.

Simplified and traditional Chinese characters could be easily translated between each other using popular translation websites. However, because simplified Chinese is a simplification of traditional Chinese, a single simplified Chinese character could correspond to multiple traditional Chinese characters. Therefore, translations should be only be performed on traditional Chinese to simplified Chinese, but not the reverse.

Non-standard form characters

Due to the lack of character standardization, some Chinese characters could be written in several ways and are included in Unicode as different glyphs. Only standard characters should be used for official tracklists. For alternative "as-is" tracklists, any non-standard character should follow the character form printed on the release.

Punctuation

Chinese punctuation differ slightly between different regions.

Full-width/half-width.

Transliteration into Latin script

Chinese releases may be transliterated into Latin script, usually as Pseudo-Releases. While there are many romanization systems for Chinese, Hanyu Pinyin is the most common in MusicBrainz. In Hanyu Pinyin, only the first letter of a sentence and proper nouns should be capitalized.[1]

Examples:

Multiple Languages

When foreign languages are mixed with Chinese in release or track titles they should be capitalized according to the Capitalization Standard of that language. There should not be a space between words in Latin script and Chinese characters (for example, "親愛的Jazz" not "親愛的 Jazz"). There also should not be a space between numbers and Chinese characters (for example, "第1個" not "第 1 個"). The only spaces permitted are those between words in Latin script.

Examples:



Notes

  1. More detailed writing rules can be found in Basic Rules of Hanyu Pinyin Orthography.


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