OMG, here we go AGAIN. Let me suggest to you Taro, since you are making a culture based argument and used soem inflammatory language in your post, specifically "which is popular among English-speaking people how don't have an understanding of the Japanese language." That you not only just might be dead wrong, but are IN FACT dead wrong. The culture wwe use is that that is displayed on Screen in exactkly the way it is displayed On screen. I am fully aware of not only the intricacies of Japanese naming but Asian naming in general. The culture that we use is the film's credits and whatever answer you come up with to make yourself happy, is fine, as long as you understand that at some point, probably through the Credited As system, that the data looks like it does On screen.

If for example The Duke were to have acted in an Asian film and the credit On screen read Wayne John, I would tell you exactly the same thing, changing such a credit to John Wayne would be wrong, ir could be handled through the credited As/Common Name system, but the end result data would look like Wayne John, just as it is displayed On screen in this fictional hypothetical.

We are Profiling Movie credits not Family trees.

Now don't make the same presumptions ever again. Some of us know exactly what the issue is and your assumption is false as are most assumptions. You do know the meaning of ASSUME don't you?

Skip

Skip, have you read what is being asked? This is not about parsing.

Romanisation is the conversion from the Japanese characters to the English alphabet. This is not about culture, but about display. Without Unicode support it is impossible to credit as onscreen. The compromise has been to use romanisation
i.e. A phonetic interpretation of the (in this case) Japanese characters.

This is not exclusive to Japanese. Korean, Chinese, Thai, Hebrew, Arabic and a number of other languages use a different alphabet. As already stated, it is impossible to credit as it appears onscreen. In this instance we have a user attempting to get people together to discuss which convention to use to display the credits. Having worked on anime credits, I know that there is no general concensus on which is best.

Quoting Dr Pavlov:

Quote:
Now don't make the same presumptions ever again. Some of us know exactly what the issue is and your assumption is false as are most assumptions. You do know the meaning of ASSUME don't you?

That was uncalled for. You are out of line. Again.

Quoting W0m6at:

Quote:
Skip, have you read what is being asked? This is not about parsing.

Romanisation is the conversion from the Japanese characters to the English alphabet. This is not about culture, but about display. Without Unicode support it is impossible to credit as onscreen. The compromise has been to use romanisation
i.e. A phonetic interpretation of the (in this case) Japanese characters.

This is not exclusive to Japanese. Korean, Chinese, Thai, Hebrew, Arabic and a number of other languages use a different alphabet. As already stated, it is impossible to credit as it appears onscreen. In this instance we have a user attempting to get people together to discuss which convention to use to display the credits. Having worked on anime credits, I know that there is no general concensus on which is best.

Quoting Dr Pavlov:

Quote:
Now don't make the same presumptions ever again. Some of us know exactly what the issue is and your assumption is false as are most assumptions. You do know the meaning of ASSUME don't you?

That was uncalled for. You are out of line. Again.

No, Wom, YOU are out of line, SIR. I did not insult his intelligence as I highlighted. BTW it all windds up going to the same place ultimately. I would love to see the system be able to deal with the various alphabets, that are possible and perhaps one day it will, right now it poses a problem for many alphabets worldwide, we can't handle Cyrillic properly or even some the Germanic alphabet.

Now as to your precise point, if you want this user in particular, to read and address the fine points, then don't use inflammatory language such as Taro did. Once i see that kind of language, presuming the Community to be made up of dolts, then I no longer care what you have to say. Yet again a case of a user ignoring the behavior that drew the ire, while slapping the user who responded to it.

Skip

Skip

Eommen:

You get no where by throwing mud at me, while ignoring the Taros utterly ridiculous remark.

Now would you like to offer some equal critcism.

Taro is but one in a long line of new users to highlight this issue, and i am absolutely certain that next new user with an interest in this area will start it all over again, for the umpteenth time.   He is however the first to have insulted the intelligence of other users by saying "popular among English-speaking people how don't have an understanding of the Japanese language."

Skip

Skip,

Your original remark was about name word sequence. Taro did not make a remark on that.

There have also been a number of long running discussions on name interpretation, basically whether first, middle and last name should refer to literal word sequence or to Western-style culture where last name equals family name. You have expressed your viewpoint there vehemently and I propose we leave it at the conclusions of those threads.

As said, Taro's remark was not about that. His qualification of the Hepburn-system hit a soft spot, clearly. But what do you want, multiple references from the web to prove the point? This is a forum post, not a profile contribution on birth years   Taro's claim is that "Hepburn" is very western-culture-biased. Why is that ridiculous?

Quoting eommen:

Quote:
Skip,

Your original remark was about name word sequence. Taro did not make a remark on that.

There have also been a number of long running discussions on name interpretation, basically whether first, middle and last name should refer to literal word sequence or to Western-style culture where last name equals family name. You have expressed your viewpoint there vehemently and I propose we leave it at the conclusions of those threads.

As said, Taro's remark was not about that. His qualification of the Hepburn-system hit a soft spot, clearly. But what do you want, multiple references from the web to prove the point? This is a forum post, not a profile contribution on birth years   Taro's claim is that "Hepburn" is very western-culture-biased. Why is that ridiculous?

Eommen:

I did not challenge his comment about the Hepburn system. I suggest you look again.

Let me help you, this was totally uneccessary "don't have an understanding of the Japanese language."

That is the THIRD time, now.

Skip

I did look again.

First, I think I can safely assume most English speaking people, or for that matter most on the American, European and African continents, do not know Japanese in any way. To them it is a language across the other side of the globe.

Taro just said, admittently without proof, that "Hepburn" was popular with them.

As you expressed in your last posts, you do have an understanding of (at least part of) Japanese. (No offence intended). Great ! Means you do not belong to the group Taro was referring to. Why then feel offended?

Edit: seeing Wom6at saying basically the same: I cannot read the original post as that Taro was asserting all English speaking don't have an understanding of Japanese. He was clearly defining a subsection of the group...

First of all, I would like to apologize if I have offended anyone. It is certainly not my intent to insult anyone and I merely wanted to throw this issue into the community for two reasons, as everyone except Skip seems to have understood:
- there is no unicode support (at least for now)
- if no consensus is made within the community, we'll end up with different romanizations of the same names or titles

To clarify a few points and answer some of Skip's remarks:

Regarding the offensive nature of my post
Frankly, I'm baffled you experience my post as being insulting or aggressive. I certainly do not mean to suggest that people who are unable to read Japanese are less intelligent than others or that their opinions have less value.
A little bit of background info perhaps: I am a Japanologist. This doesn't make me an authority in the matter, far from it, but in my courses, we have studied the various common romanisation systems and, going by information provided by Mext (the Japanese Ministery of Education, among others), it turned out that statistcally speaking:
- native Japanese speakers all use Kunrei-shiki (as this is the system thaught in Japanese schools)
- foreign Japanese scholars (like me) prefer Kunrei-shiki or JSL (because these are closer to the native Japanese writing system)
- other foreigners prefer Hepburn, as it is a method based on pronunciation rather than transcribing Japanese writing (which makes sense, since it's easier for them to understand how to pronounce a word)

Now, if you find it offensive that I have quoted statistical data from my courses (which date back to '98-'99, granted), then really I don't know what else I could  post here without vexing or upsetting you.

Regarding the reason behind my post
I am fully aware that the rules stipulate we need to enter names as they are credited. Personally, I even agree with that. However, I have a stack of about 400 Japanese DVD's. These DVD's don't contain any rômaji at all. Worse yet, the current version of DVD Profiler, due to the lack of Unicode support simply does not enable me to enter the names in native Japanese writing. If I would enter all my DVD's in Japanese and send it to the Invelos server, it would be nothing but scrambled computer characters.
Thus, I believe there is a serious need to make a convention or even apply this in the rules on how we transcribe such names and titles. Otherwise, we risk ending up with an inconsistent online database and as I understood it, that is exactly what Invelos and the community want to prevent from happening.

Case in point, this is just one example of a DVD in my collection. As you can see, there is NO English at all on the cover and neither is their in the credits. So, I need to romanize them myself and would like to know which romanization system I should use to do so:
http://www.dmm.com/rental/ppr/-/detail/=/cid=n_623dabr0292/
The title alone poses a problem. Do I write 'Yôkai Daisensô' or 'Youkai Daisensou'?

Why JSL?
I am fully aware that the prefered system by the Japanese government as well as many Japanese scholars is Kunrei-shiki. However, for our purposes, I believe JSL would be better suited, because it differentiates between among others 'ou' and 'oo' writings, whereas both Hepburn and Kunrei-shiki merely transcribe these as 'ô' (a long 'o' sound). This part of my original post is indeed personal preference and not based on any factual evidence.
I'll even go a step further as I am keeping a seperate list with original Japanese names and their romanization in a XL-list. Certain Japanese names are transcribed the exact same way but can have dozens of Japanese writing possibilities. Just think of the family name Satou, which has over 10 different writings, all pronounced the same and thus transcribed the same way. Unfortunately, this is a problem that can only be solved by adding unicode support, but using the JSL system would at least already eliminate a few problems we would have with Kunrei-shiki and even more problems with Hepburn.


For now, I'll submit my contributions in JSL, until a consensus is agreed upon. But I do think a serious brain-storming session regarding these problems (not only Japanese but also other languages) is useful, if only to prevent having to adapt vast parts of the database lateron.

For those that took my post seriously and didn't take offense, thank you for your input and for reading my post as I intended it. Skip, no offense but I hope we can keep discussing this matter in a constructive, civilized way.