The Great Ghibli Disaster of 2014

[dancey]

So, when doing my regular updating of the database of albums I've purchased as I receive them, and being the attention-to-detail oriented person that I am, and also being the general go-to "resource" for Hisaishi/Ghibli related albums, or at least in terms of owning most of them, I've noticed a pretty awful trend.

User JTurner (and also, to some extent Efendja) have updated a bunch of old Ghibli albums English tracklists with "localized" tracklist from Wasabi Records (I've never heard of them, but they appear to be French), Wayo Records (I can't find any indication that they localized Ghibli albums at all so no idea where it is coming from. Could the one admin here that works for or owns Wayo comment on this?), and Nausicaa.net. Nausicaa.net, while a great resource for Ghibli related information, it's a terrible resource for tracklists and general soundtrack information. Their translations are actually good but their formatting is terrible, often ignoring the Japanese and localizing things like ~ to -, using parenthesis on things that don't actually have parenthesis on them, and camel casing things that shouldn't be camel-cased ("Flying boatmen --> Flying Boatmen"). Additionally, throughout the years I've found incorrect release dates for albums. Until their switch to the wiki format they had no way to even change incorrect information. I think there was also a few tracklists that got updated to iTunes localizations, which I'm alright with but would prefer a separate "English (iTunes)" version since they also tend to de-format some of the Japanese formatting like ~, ( ), etc. On top of all that, I'm not really a huge fan of using a non English record labels English localizations for track titles unless Ghibli provided them to them (unlikely?). Seems like a double translation/localization and that's assuming someone's fluent in all 3 languages (JP --> native --> EN).

I put a significant amount of work into the original entries and while I don't really care if someone edits my edits, I do care if the effort and work they put into the edits is just sloppy.

I don't really want to go and re-edit everything, I may end up just editing them as I see them (I've already fixed some stuff) because a) it's a lot of work and b) there's still no mechanism to prevent edits to things. I think this was brought up for the frequently edited SQEX albums like FFVII and Chrono Trigger since there's so many variations of stuff. There really needs to be a lock that prevents (even staff/trusted editors) from making edits once something is in an acceptable state and only unlocked for some sort of community agreeable consensus

I'm the first one to admit that I'm not fluent in Japanese and some of my translations can be improved, but I always post questions and ask for feedback on stuff that I'm not sure about and I always post an edit history and a general "reason" if I make any sort of significant edit to something. The complete lack of that in all the changes mentioned above is the really concerning part.

Any insight/comments appreciated.

[Efendija]

I know I submitted some Ghibli tracklists back in 2011, no doubt I made some mistakes then, I was learning how the site works, and I was a normal user. But I believe I left a link or "translated by -----" for checking (perhaps not always I don't remember). Wasabi Records is a label of Kaze, a legal French company, so the translation is valid. iTunes is also official lately. Only problem I see are the translations and/or formatting from Nausicaa.net. At least from my part, I think you've maybe blown this out of proportions.

Oh, about Wayo, I know they handled Ni no Kuni but hardly anything else (Zanasea will tell you), I'm sure I haven't credited them at all.

[dancey]

Well, it wasn't as much as sleight at you or the other guy as it was just really trying to get to the bottom of the edits. It's frustrating after all the time and effort I put into most of them, I'm sure people can relate.

[Illidan]

I think that if those really are english tracklists from official sources they should be preserved as alternate tracklists regardless of the fact that they may or may not be officially endorsed by Studio Ghibli, as that's a thing that we probably can't verify.

That being said, does Wasabi actually include english tracklists in their releases? All I can find is french, so if they really are translations from french like dancey said then we should probably remove the Wasabi credit and fix them with the proper styling from the japanese tracklist.

The tracklists taken from fan sites such as nausicaa should obviously have their styling fixed, I suppose whoever approved them didn't notice they are inconsistent.

[dancey]

I couldn't even find any indication that Wasabi records has released anything Ghibli. Same with Wayo, but at least we all know Wayo is a reliable label and we have at least some way to verify their legitimacy through Zanasea ;p

[Illidan]

We have a few albums in the database: http://vgmdb.net/search?do=results&id=207101
They're also on the distributor site: http://anime.kaze.fr/produit/porco_r...udio_ghibli_cd

But again like I said, everything is in french (and romaji on the site), but I don't see any english.

EDIT: since we're talking about them, I may as well post this here. Regarding the Porco Rosso tracklist, any particular reason why you changed the ~ to ー? I would use -, or maybe —, but ー is another thing and it looks wrong depending on the font used. Also track 2 should probably be MAMMAIUTO with just 1 A.

[Efendija]

Wasabi tracklists I used were for French reprints, they contain the French tracklists, not English, I wasn't clear about that, such as
http://vgmdb.net/album/42893 (there's also Kaze order page link there)

Where Wasabi picked up English ones I don't know, they might have released one general version for the rest of Europe so they needed English but again, I don't know about that.

As for editing, this one for example:
http://vgmdb.net/album/22807
English tracklist was submitted by me, probably in 2011, then the history:
http://vgmdb.net/db/albums-history.php?id=22807

Translation link from nausicaa.net was removed by JTurner so I can assume that was my source for the original tracklist, switched to Wasabi one afterwards (and still English) but I really don't know about this, Wasabi info I used was for French tracklists of Wasabi reprints.

[Efendija]

Did some more research...

Scans of Wasabi's releases for Europe (not French specific) so they do have English tracklists (scroll down to see all of the scans):
http://www.discogs.com/viewimages?release=4570988
http://www.discogs.com/viewimages?release=4570921
http://www.discogs.com/viewimages?release=4570911
http://www.discogs.com/viewimages?release=4571073

It seems they release a French specific (all printed in French naturally) and another version for the rest of Europe (in English, they call it "English edition", look at the very last line of the Porco Rosso scan)
http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/...L._SL1500_.jpg

Also just a cat/barcode comparison, so yeah, two editions
Kiki Wasabi French - 9102470 [catalog] 3700091024707 [barcode] http://catalogue.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/cb42744325x/PUBLIC
Kiki Wasabi Europe general aka "English edition" - 9102500 [catalog] 3700091025001 [barcode] http://www.cdandlp.com/item/2/0-1604...undtrack-.html

or in Amazon images
http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/...L._SL1500_.jpg
http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/...L._SL1500_.jpg

Important part - (Wasabi) English tracklists match the North America iTunes ones (so they are not different English translations, they're the same) and Ghibli exclusively puts the OSTs on iTunes lately (regarding the digital distribution of course) and because of that (assuming soundtracks first appeared on iTunes), Wasabi could be just using iTunes English, while they can certainly have their own French tracklists...

Oh and it can happen some songs are missing on iTunes (because of licensing issues probably), tracks 20 & 21 here, Yumi Arai's
https://itunes.apple.com/us/album/ki...al/id882658777
but Wasabi has them
http://www.discogs.com/viewimages?release=4571073

I believe too we should remove JTurner's crediting of "Wasabi Records" just in case... but on styling, I actually wouldn't replace iTunes "-/–" with "~" because if I'm copy/pasting the only officially sourced English tracklist, I wouldn't change the integrity of it, in my opinion. If this was a fan tracklist, I would have no objections about fixing the styling of course.

[dancey]

I believe too we should remove JTurner's crediting of "Wasabi Records" just in case... but on styling, I actually wouldn't replace iTunes "-/–" with "~" because if I'm copy/pasting the only officially sourced English tracklist, I wouldn't change the integrity of it, in my opinion. If this was a fan tracklist, I would have no objections about fixing the styling of course.

This is true but I thought this was typically separated into "English" and "English (iTunes)" lists. Where English would be the translation version maintaining formatting, and English (iTunes) would just straight from (...) source.

[Efendija]

Second English tracklist because of Japanese styling, e.g. ~ ? With the same official translation?
I personally think it's not worth it but again, it's just my opinion.

Another thing, if you believe one more English tracklist should be there for fan translation version, I'm ok with that, in the same way I haven't deleted your Kaguya translation:
http://vgmdb.net/album/41735

[Zanasea]

Originally Posted by dancey

I couldn't even find any indication that Wasabi records has released anything Ghibli. Same with Wayo, but at least we all know Wayo is a reliable label and we have at least some way to verify their legitimacy through Zanasea ;p

We have only localized the Ni no Kuni soundtrack—in collaboration with Level 5 so it's 100% official—but we have never handled any other Ghibli works. Anything credited to us outside Ni no Kuni is incorrect!

[Datschge]

"We"? Didn't know you work there.

[Zanasea]

Heh, yes, I'm one of the founding members of Wayô.

[Illidan]

Now that the tracklist issue should be resolved (if I missed any tracklists when I cleaned them up/reverted the changes, let me know), I've noticed that a lot of Ghibli albums use the english movie name as the display title, even if it doesn't appear anywhere in the album.
This is also pretty random and very inconsistent, so I would like to fix it in one way or the other.

As far as I know, we're not supposed to use the english name as the display title, regardless of how popular something is (since that's pretty subjective, and sometimes there are different english titles depending on the country/time of release so it can get pretty confusing).

Does anyone have any objections to changing them to the romaji title, if the english one does not appear on the scans?

[Efendija]

Setting English display titles for Ghibli soundtracks was one of the earlier ways even if it's conflicting the current guidelines. It was based (iirc) on a popularity of the movie in the west so it's better known in English title.

btw another old thing that's still alive today is adding anything (not anime/vg related) by Joe Hisaishi even though his non-anime/vg work seems to outweigh the anime side (a lot)... and we generally don't do that today for artists that have most of their work outside of game/animation.

If we should bring some consistency for older entries (such as Ghibli ones) and follow the current guidelines, why not.

[dancey]

Originally Posted by Efendija

Setting English display titles for Ghibli soundtracks was one of the earlier ways even if it's conflicting the current guidelines. It was based (iirc) on a popularity of the movie in the west so it's better known in English title.

btw another old thing that's still alive today is adding anything (not anime/vg related) by Joe Hisaishi even though his non-anime/vg work seems to outweigh the anime side (a lot)... and we generally don't do that today for artists that have most of their work outside of game/animation.

If we should bring some consistency for older entries (such as Ghibli ones) and follow the current guidelines, why not.

Hisaishi wasn't allowed for a very long time but because he has a significant contribution to anime works in general, SS allowed the addition of his entire catalogue.

[Efendija]

Yeah, he was allowed based on his popularity (and not on a ratio & quantity), I know he's "an exception" so yeah, whatever.

Also this doesn't look like a decision to allow his entire catalogue:
http://vgmdb.net/forums/showpost.php...69&postcount=5
but oh well... everything about this was said and done a long time ago.