The Movie Database Support
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Protocol for Asian Names (Titles and People)
posted by lifeasfictionSTAFFMOD on April 11, 2014 at 8:39 AM
Hi, I've become active on the site ever since joining Letterboxd. One of the constant inconsistencies, however, has been Asian naming conventions for both titles as well as people.
TITLES
- Let's take the Korean film Oldboy as an example. Is it preferable for the original title to be "올드보이" or "Ol-deu-bo-i"?
PEOPLE
- As you may know, Asian culture (as well as some others) have their family names at the beginning. Continuing to use our Oldboy example, should it be "Park Chan-wook" or "Chan-wook Park"?
- Additionally, there are different Romanization techniques for different languages. I'd imagine it's important to finalize the method. Personally, it makes sense to stay consistent with IMDb and Wikipedia and use the Revised Romanization method.
Would appreciate clarity on this matter.
Cheers.
Reply by Travis Bell
on April 11, 2014 at 10:56 AM
The way we handle movies and people is different, actually. This is due to the fact that we don't yet (at this time) support translating people while we do movies.
The basics are though, for movies, the original title should be the native title in whatever alphabet is original (올드보이) in this case. "Oldboy" would be the translated English title and "Ol-deu-bo-i" should be added as an alternative title.
For people, we expect everything to be in english. Names, and biographies. People will be getting some translatable fields much like movies and at that time, we'll support having different names. With regards to the name format, this has not really been brought up. I would assume we would stay with whatever IMDb is doing.
Cheers.
Reply by lifeasfiction
on April 16, 2014 at 3:47 AM
Thanks, Travis. Agree with all of this, especially the part with the naming convention. From now on, I'll refer to this if needed, though I'd suggest adding the bit about following IMDb formatting to the /people page for clarity.