Quote:
Originally Posted by _if
But wait, why are songs so different than BGM? We translate instrumental score titles, why not translate the stuff with singing too?
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Yeah, I'm going to ignore the rest of the debate, since I have no place in it anyway, but this... seriously, why wouldn't we translate the name of a song like we always do on this site. I'm perplexed by this. In fact, that distinction you're making, _if, doesn't even exist - "songs" aren't any different than "BGM", "BGM" is just as much a "song" as any other "song" (and I don't mean to attack you by this, I mean to further argue the same point). So what's the criteria for not translating - that the song has lyrics? That it's a certain genre? I'm not seeing the rationale. We can use this same argument to say that any song, BGM or otherwise, shouldn't be translated "just because people don't know the meaning" of the Japanese, because it was written in Japanese originally and intended to be in Japanese. Then why are we translating anything? It's a poor argument.
If a word is a name, then obviously, don't translate it. But barring that, the title of a song written in Japanese has a meaning in English just like any other song, BGM or not. Or do you think that when they write Suteki da ne, they aren't asking "Isn't it lovely?" You think they're writing those words for the sake of writing Japanese characters? No, those words have a meaning. We should discover that meaning in our language like the meaning of any other song name. "Suteki da ne" doesn't mean "Suteki da ne" and so it doesn't belong in an English tracklist whose point is to discover what the Japanese words
mean. If not, then otherwise again, why are we translating anything.
Also, if you're going to argue that it's the song's name: yes, it is, just like every single song on this database that we have a translation for. Track 5 in
Alundra is
named 悪夢 and so we shouldn't translate it as nightmare "just because people don't know the meaning" of Akumu, so let's just leave it like Akumu because that's the song's
name. Then at that point let's just romaji everything.
I don't mean to be belligerent, but there really isn't a good reason to keep things that have a meaning in English in romaji, unless it's a name or Japanese term (
good reading on that).