[CHz]

I'm not sure we've ever had a discussion about this except maybe in passing. Like most of the things I bring up it's just a minor translation/presentation issue, but it's one that does pop up every now and then.

Here's the name of a popular Touhou track:

幽霊楽団 ～ Phantom Ensemble

The English part of the title is a pretty serviceable translation of the Japanese part. So when this tune is arranged on an album and we're working on an English tracklist, what should we do? I can think of four different ways to handle the title, and I'm fairly certain I've used all four at least once just for this one piece here on VGMdb:

1. Use only the translation, since it was helpfully provided: Phantom Ensemble
2. Romanize the Japanese part: Yuurei Gakudan ~ Phantom Ensemble
3. Translate the Japanese part slightly differently: Ghostly Band ~ Phantom Ensemble
4. Just use the same translation twice: Phantom Ensemble ~ Phantom Ensemble

#1 is what I usually do these days when the English is obviously a translation of the Japanese: when a translation is provided, why be redundant? This does throw away part of the title though. Especially for something like Touhou where some titles are completely in Japanese, the fact that the title is originally written in Japanese and English may be worth capturing in some way.

#2 I did for a while because of that problem, but mixing romaji and English in a translation started seeming weak to me.

#3 just strikes me as a mild mistranslation. We already have one English translation in the title, so we don't need a second one that's different.

#4 is incredibly silly, but it's also 100% accurate!

So I guess chime in with your favorite way of being anal about this kind of thing.

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It's rare, but it also sometimes happens that the translation is in a language other than English. Pink Sweets's soundtrack uses Japanese and Italian in the tracklist, and Yohsui O'asa's 蛇 -Serpiente- mixes Japanese and Spanish in the title.

I submitted 蛇 -Serpiente- as just "Serpiente" using the same reasoning as #1: it's the same word in two different languages, so why say it twice? Going to English as "Snake -Serpiente-" also works for me in this case, though, since we're not saying the same thing twice in the same language.