Discussion: using tracklists from digital reprintings.

[Secret Squirrel]

I wanted to open a discussion about track titles for older albums, prompted by some recent work by @BlazingAbyss and others to replace the tracklists from old albums with the contemporary itunes versions. The old tracklists are originally in japanese, and have been translated -- this translation may be literal or it may be informed by western localizations. Generally, any english text and all punctuation is preserved. The digital album translations in may cases are better, though the formatting has been modified for presentation.

This album is a good example. I've added the original tracklist back for comparison.

My main questions are as follows.

1) We sometimes label the itunes (or other modern digital) tracklist as "(official)", and other times we label it as "(digital)", or "(itunes)". Should we standardize this? Is the itunes tracklist really official for all of these reissues? I recall some cases where the digital tracklists were somewhat-obvious machine translations/romanizations, so it makes me wonder.

2) Is there value, as I did for PERFECT COLLECTION Dragon Slayer above, in keeping an "English" tracklist that preserves the english text as originally printed, along with the formatting and style? (For the Japanese parts of the titles, I don't think we should keep bad literal translations if the digital releases have better ones.)

3) If 1) and 2) are true, then do we want the official/itunes or the english tracklist to be the default?

[Robin]

Just keep both types of tracklists. The point of multiple tracklists is to have different possible sources.
imo official should only be in the case of it being referenced to as such on the release itself (like SQUARE does within the booklet, like here) or the official website.

There's always value in keeping something as it's originally stylized and as close to the original as possible, while attempting to localize/translate it. There's just as much value to keep whatever digital platform suggests, wether it's semi automated or trustworthy.

As for the default, I don't think it really matters. Whatever's the closest to the original, and sometimes that's gonna be Apple Music. I think in general, "Official" is very unspecific term and it needs to be changed to whatever's the source. "English (Apple Music)", "English (Booklet)", "English (Steam & Localized)"... There's no harm in naming those with more specification rather than trying to find a one time perfect "Official" tracklist.

[Ayana]

I would make the original language the default release language. You can add whatever translations you want from referense on top of it except for it.

I understand that you are trying to position VGMdb as an “English-speaking community”. I don't get it at all though, everyone uses it. If we want to have enough accurate information, there can't be any romaji/english (so also from any itunes) as a default language.

Even if you're against my opinion above, I'm still against translations from digital sites. Only official sources can offer translation.

[BlazingAbyss]

1) You raise a good point. I would recommend going with "English (Digital)" since most albums that are available on iTunes are also available on Amazon. When using a digital release as a source, it should be linked as the "Translation Web Source," so unless there's multiple digital releases with differing translations, I don't think that it's necessary to list "iTunes" specifically in the language title. However, I should mention that iTunes and Amazon aren't always consistent when it comes to things like capitalization. I've seen several instances where words like "is" are capitalized on one site, but not the other. I've also noticed that translations for the same track aren't always consistent between releases either. For example, the digital release of Music from Ys III: Wanderers from Ys translates "ユーザーディスク作成" as "User Disc Creation" while the digital release of Ys III J.D.K. Special translates it as "User Disk Creation." Should the digital translations be tweaked in order to maintain consistency between related albums? Additionally, there are some instances where the digital translations are misspelled or grammatically incorrect. Should such instances be corrected if there's no doubt about them being mistakes, or should they remain 1:1 regardless?

2) In instances like this where the only difference is whether or not all the letters are capitalized, I don't think that it's really necessary to have two separate English tracklists. However, there's probably at least a few cases in other albums where titles were intentionally capitalized for stylistic purposes or because they're an acronym, but that capitalization wasn't maintained in the digital release, so I can see an argument for having two of them. Also, should we include extra text like "(Special Arrange)" on the digital tracklists if they aren't featured in the original text? Typically that sort of information is located in the booklet, so the additional text is likely only there because it couldn't be featured elsewhere on a digital release.

3) I think that would depend on the album since digital releases aren't always consistent about how they translate things. Some use literal translations, some are localized, some use a mix of both English and romaji, etc.

[Secret Squirrel]

Thank you, everyone, for all of the discussion and comments here and in discord. It seems like there are compelling reasons for keeping a separate english tracklist stylized as the original in addition to any separate digital tracklists.

Originally Posted by BlazingAbyss

Should the digital translations be tweaked in order to maintain consistency between related albums? Additionally, there are some instances where the digital translations are misspelled or grammatically incorrect. Should such instances be corrected if there's no doubt about them being mistakes, or should they remain 1:1 regardless?

In the past, we have added multiple tracklists when the shops were different enough, so I don't think we should create am amalgamated digital tracklist.

Originally Posted by BlazingAbyss

Also, should we include extra text like "(Special Arrange)" on the digital tracklists if they aren't featured in the original text?

Yeah, I think those should be included when you consider this as archiving or preserving the information in the digital tracklist. I don't think we should correct anything. This kind of lends support for keeping an English version that preserves the intent of the physical tracklist as well.

Originally Posted by Ayana

I would make the original language the default release language. You can add whatever translations you want from referense on top of it except for it.

I think this is a good argument for some kind of "original" mode, where you view everything in its original language.

[Efendija]

I'll also just mostly repeat here what I've said on Discord.

If there's an (entirely) English tracklist printed on the physical release, it'll surely be the default. No matter how good or bad it is, it should be the default in this case. We've always wanted to preserve printed stuff, there's no reason to change this policy now imo.
However I don't see a problem when only digital release gets English tracklist later because a lot of the time that's the only way many albums will get it in some official capacity. It happened time and time again.

What digital storefronts (iTunes, Amazon, Spotify, Qobuz etc) get is normally submitted by an employee of label, publisher or distributor of the album in question. Some storefronts have automation to capitalize everything etc but not change the translation/localization as submitted. As an example, iTunes used to apply the capitalization script very aggressively. I preferred Amazon's version for this reason, to preserve the originally submitted capitalization better. Things might've changed though.

Quality of the submitted info can vary a lot. Official party chooses what to use: good translator, bad translator/company or just machine translation. Some labels even "steal" fan translations, I've seen it happening. Even during the submission itself employee can typo an already existing English track title. If the publisher/label/distributor doesn't want to translate/localize particular album, then that's it. You're not obliged to make a localization to sell things on digital storefronts. But obviously we're interested in the case when localization/translation does happen.

[seanne]

I think our rules regarding tracklists have been pretty clear - that the default tracklist should be either a printed english tracklist if one exists, or a faithful translation, including capitalization and formatting, if only a japanese tracklist exists. I don't think there's a need to deviate from that standard.

So I don't think we should replace existing translated tracklists with ones found on digital storefronts, nor would I consider them particularly official, especially not when it comes to old albums (released in the days before digital). The example used by SS is a 34 year old album and this particular itunes tracklist I would disqualify for using incorrect capitalization and for adding "(Special Arrange)" to the tracks on disc 2 (for informative reasons). I don't see how it adds anything of value to the entry beyond being innacurate for the physical album.

Personally I would not even add digital tracklists to the entry for albums this old, the creation of them is to suspect - random outsourcing, inaccurate capitalization/formatting, questions around if the translator has played the game or even understands in-game context at all, literally re-using existing fan translations, etc. If someone is really interested they could be posted in the forum thread as a cusiosity.

It's a different thing for modern albums though, released physically and digitally at the same time. There you will inevitably find that people won't bother to make a translation since there is already a digital one, and they will add that one to the entry, and this is the only thing we will get.