Questions and thoughts about naming of the anime titles

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NGEfreak
Posts: 18
Joined: Fri Dec 17, 2004 6:02 pm

Questions and thoughts about naming of the anime titles

Post by NGEfreak »

1. Separation of maintitle and subtitle

Sometimes the subtitle is separated with a colon. Sometimes with a hyphen or other characters like ~. Shouldn’t there be used only one consistent style? And if yes, which one would be preferred?


2. Acronyms and capitalized titles

Some titles are written with all letters capitalized.

Examples:
GANTZ
Koukaku Kidoutai STAND ALONE COMPLEX

All these words are not acronyms and shouldn’t be written all uppercased. What do you think?


3. Special reading of Japanese titles

Some titles have special readings for the kanjis which are often English words.

Example:

Title of Mahou Kishi Rayearth is 魔法騎士レイアース, but the reading above the kanjis isn’t Mahou Kishi, it’s マジックナイト (= Magic Knight).

The special readings for the Kanji’s are ignored on most titles yet, but sometimes not (ex.: Chingonka – Requiem from the Rurouni Kenshin movie). The readings should be either consistently used or not.


4. Romanization of English words, places, names, etc

Names, places, etc and non-Japanese words shouldn’t be written like the Japanese pronunciation. Or would you write for example Final Fantasy like this: Fainaru Fantashii? I guess not. ;)
egg
Posts: 769
Joined: Tue Nov 11, 2003 7:17 am

Post by egg »

I feel like a bowl of petunias, "Oh no, not again." :roll:

This is part of a conversation that has been discussed extensively (mostly by Rar & rowaasr13). Here are a few of the conversations: [EDIT] DNA^2 romaji, Remind users not to add certain characters to Anime-Titles, ''Romaji, Hepburn''. There are a few others, but that is a bulk of it...
Rar
AniDB Staff
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Joined: Fri Mar 12, 2004 2:41 pm
Location: UK
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Post by Rar »

To sum up my opinions,
1) Official Japanese and English (US release generally) titles should be kept formatted as given by the maker, as far possible. Romaji is pronuciation only and some kind of standard should be stuck with.
2) As this is one of the few 'embelishments' that can be kept withough breaking plain text searches, I'm reasonably care free about it. However, as the japanese are used to sigle case scripts, adhering to rules over this would lead to a lot more caps all over the place... and shounting isn't needed mostly.
3) I try to preserve both, in the japanese and romaji fields, if relevant. Furigana for roman script is generally ignored, but for kanji I use [] as a rule - less used than (). I've tended to do: Whole Title [Furigana Title] as this is less search breaky, if kanji search is ever unbroken. A couple of examples.
4) Katakana loanwords are rendered back into their original script, as far as ASCII lets ya. Feel free to squash ('correct') anything that doesn't do this.

Little issues beyond this tend to get unessersarily messy, but hey, part of the fun.

Rar
rowaasr13
Posts: 415
Joined: Sat Sep 27, 2003 4:57 am

Post by rowaasr13 »

My opinion is mostly same except that I think that romaji should be formatted exactly like japanese title and furigana should be in () and only cover words with furigana, not entire title, just because that is standard usage of furigana.
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