Talk:AniDB Definition:Romanisation: Difference between revisions

===Rules used at anidb===

anyway moved it to the public "Anidb Discussion" forum if you want to have a look at it.

Should not be used in romaji anime (and most likely ep.) names - out of low-ascii and, therefore, PITA for file systems and many non-unicode programs.

Spell as in english if it is composed from full words. Abbreviations... are more difficult to judge.

Spell as in official <b>japanese</b> materials. It is hard sometimes to find names in latin in japanese material though. <b>Ignore</b> materials from translated releases.

Reverted a minor edit by coo, which was well intentioned but mostly incorrect... I *know* anidb calls them 'kanji titles' internally, but there's no need to propogate wrongness, very few japanese titles are kanji only. --[[User:Rar|Rar]] 05:52, 13 November 2005 (CET)

# Recognisation

# Pronouncation

So, returning to the two purposes of romanisation. In my opinion, those two purposes are different ways of expressing the same thing, since recognisation generally can boil down to pronouncation. Remember that 和製英語 is not pronounced like English? Then, why should an English speaker be able to recognise a 和製英語 word, when it's not pronounced like he/she would expect, given the "romanised" title? Isn't it then better to make a true romanisation, where you romanise the pronouncation, instead of translating certain words, depending on their etymological origin?

It's a widely accepted fact that ローマ字 (''rōmaji'') doesn't lend a non-Japanese speaker a good chance of pronouncing the romanised text correctly, you actually need some knowledge of Japanese phonetics to do that. It doesn't help the pronouncation if you purposefully fill in even-further-from-Japanese words into the romanisation.

Finally, let me give an example of a word that just can't fit properly into those current "romanisation" rules: ダブる (''daburu''). A verb, derived from english ''double'', meaning "to double, to repeat". Like any Japanese verb, it can be inflected, ダブります (''daburimasu''), ダブった (''dabutta''), ダブらない (''daburanai'') etc. Would you "romanise" those as "''doublimasu''", "''doubtta''", "''doublanai''", or perhaps translate then, "double" (?!? same thing, different pronouncation?), "doubled", "not double"? Neither of those two are a good solution, so you suddenly have to break your rule.

Conclusion: Romanise Japanese words as Japanese. It lends an English speaker a better chance of recognising a word in a title after hearing the title pronounced (the reader of the ローマ字 should be assumed to not know 漢字 (''kanji''), as I've been told before, and thus can't check against any 漢字 title written). It also lends the reader a better chance of pronouncing the title close to the actual Japanese pronouncation. A third point I didn't touch yet, because it (according to the current guidelines) isn't a requirement for the romanisation, is that it actually allows one to distinguish between 和製英語 and English words in a title, looking at the ローマ字.

'''A little note on Hepburn:''' I don't like pretending to be using Hepburn romanisation when not. No official Hepburn standard (neither the traditional nor any of the officially accepted modifications to it) allows you to mimic Japanese ortography by writing long vowels using direct romanisations of the ''kana'' used to produce them. That is, no Hepburn standard allows you to romanise 王 as ''ou'', only ''ō'' (traditional Hepburn), ''oo'' and ''o' are accepted. ''ou'' is a ワプロローマ字 (''wapuro rōmaji'') spelling. Yes, real Hepburn is not filename-friendly, and not widely used inside the anime fansubbing community, so instead of pretending to be using Hepburn, rather use a better term for it: Hepburn/wapuro romanisation.

:Hmm... what's your battle here? The wasei eigo section has quite clearly not been written yet, nor, as far as I can see, does anything say anidb transcriptions should use Hepburn. I know the site has (Romaji, Hepburn) under title when adding anime, but hey, the site has lots of things that aren't really right. Anyway, unless you are implying above that you want all transcriptions to strickly follow the japanese spelling (which would be silly - better to write them in hiragana in that case and auto-romanise according to style preference on display), I suggest you take advantage of the wikiness. Hit [http://www.anidb.net/wiki/index.php?title=AniDB_Definition:Romanisation&action=edit&section=17 edit] and get writing the ''Directly transcribe wasei eigo terms from their kana spelling'' side of the debate, use what you've written above as the basis for some bullet points and you've practically done all the work already. --[[User:Rar|Rar]] 00:05, 5 December 2005 (CET)

I am refering to this part of the article:

I would like to add this part (the bottom-most two pararaphs. the beginning is denoted by |MY ADDITION|) as a guide but I don't know if my addition conflicts with this particular statement since I don't understand this statement: