Relationship Type "Is A Transl*ation Of" for Albums
Link Phrases
forward: release A is the original for the translated/transliterated track listing release B
reverse: release B is a translated/transliterated track listing of release A
Description: Indicates that an album has translated or transliterated titles on another album release. This relationship does not indicate a cover where the lyrics have been translated (that should be indicated with "cover" instead, although both relationships could apply in some cases). This relationship should only be used when the number and order of tracks on the two albums are identical, and each of the titles corresponds in meaning.
Description
This AdvancedRelationshipType indicates that two releases have the exact same tracks but the TrackTitles and the ReleaseTitle are in a different language and/or script. The tracklistings are in the same order, has the same track times, and the names have the same meaning but are translations or transliterations of each other.
If the two releases have different languages it is a Translation, otherwise it is a Transliteration. A checkbox is used to choose between the two, but the Language/Script should correspond as to whether it's a Translation or Transliteration. To avoid verbosity, the term "transl*ation" is used to refer to a relationship of either type.
Not all transl*ations will be from actual releases (from the printed tracklisting for physical releases, or from the tracklisting on the official site for Internet-only releases). Even if no actual release has transl*ated titles, to provide for better InterNationalization, editors can create release entries with transl*ated titles, taken from official sites (ideally) or provided by fans or editors themselves.
Following the DontMakeRelationshipClusters principle, all transl*ations of the titles of a release should be linked to an Official release. If there are more than one (or zero) official releases, use the titles in the artist's native language as the "original" titles. In any group of releases, only one should ever have more than one "is a transl*ation of" relationship.
Release Status of Transl*ations
On a transl*ation the "Pseudo-Release" ReleaseStatus should be used for all transl*ations of titles that do not appear on an actual release (even if they appear on an official site). These releases are otherwise identical and implicitly share the same relationships and non-language/script attributes as the original language version. It is possible for the transl*ation to also be an official release, such as if a release also has an identical release overseas but the back of the CD case is transl*ated by the label for overseas sale. In this case there will be two "official releases" and no pseudo-release in the relationship. As for the direction of the AR and which should be the "original", the original should default to the native language of the artist; any odd circumstances can be handeled on a case by case basis. Luckily the addition of bonus tracks on releases from different countries makes this issue less common than at first glance.
If the album has tracks listed in duplicate languages, both languages will be tagged and the ReleaseStatus will be set to "Official". All other versions that don't reflect the album itself will be classified as "Pseudo-Release" even if the track listing on these pseudo-releases are identical to one of languages on the "official" album it is still not THE "official" release that had both languages.
In situations where the physical release can not be obtained and the artists official site lists either one language or the other, default to the native release language of the artist as the "official" version and the other as the "Pseudo-Release".
This AdvancedRelationshipType is part of the AlternativeVersionRelationshipClass, to address the issues raised in the ReleaseTransliterationAndTranslation proposal and help with the problems of VirtualDuplicateReleases.
Relationship Attributes
The AR will be a Translation unless the Transliteration checkbox is used. The translated or transliterated nature is always determined by the language(s) of the two releases.
Translation – Two releases with titles in different languages.
Transliteration – Two releases with titles in the same language, but (possibly) different scripts.
Examples
The group ![[WWW]](http://wiki.musicbrainz.org/-/musicbrainz/img/moin-www.png){kind=small}
mini-moni has the official release ミニモニ。ソングス２, but a transliterated version and translated version both exist. All share the same attributes but different track names.
Converting titles from Kanji or Cyrillic to Latin script while the words remain in Japanese or Russian would be a transliteration, as would converting English titles from Unicode to non-Unicode characters (the latter is not generally recommended, however).
Discussion
Does this AdvancedRelationship only work for Album - Album or can it be used for Track - Track also? Cause I've stumbled accross a release where the original tracks titled in Japanese, a few years later some of them appeared on a "Best Of" compilation with the track names in English/Latin --Schika
The style guideline should explicitly state that:
apart from the ReleaseStatus, the language and script attributes, all other attributes of the releases (number of tracks, times, etcetera) should be the same
any other AdvancedRelationships that apply to the release should involve only the original release (so that we DontMakeRelationshipClusters).
something about the desirability of duplicating DiscIDs, TRMs, and PUIDs across the releases
The second point probably needs some discussion about original vs. official (what if the Official release is not the original one?) @alex
On point two, it would be ideal if the system automatically migrated the ARs from the official release to the pseduo releases (since they are identical); but I'm not sure if it's possible to do that yet or if waiting till NGS would eliminate the problem. Also external URL relationships (amazon, wiki, etc) should be ok since they don't link two database entries and won't create a cluster, I don't see any problems with the database and I don't know if NGS would have issues when we finally combine these. On point 3, if two albums share a discID you're given a choice between the two in Picard which is a nice bennefit, the only improvement I see is making picard deafult to one language set in the preferences. PUIDs work similar but it might be harder for picard to choose one language over the other, or would it?--Kerensky97
A very odd situation I've run into pointed out that this AR description is lacking something. Consider 4 releases: 1) Original in Italian), 2) official translation into English, 3&4) dual language German release with German translated from the Italian, but the English clearly translated from the German translation, rather than from the Italian original (based on the awkwardness of the phrasing, and clear signs of some of the other errors/order inversions you run into when you double translate text between 3 different languages - "March of the Beggars" in the correct English, "The Beggers March" in the double translated English, for an example). Now, we then have 4 releases: 1:Original 2:English#1, 3:German, 4:English#2. Now, would you AR 2/3/4 -> 1 using this AR (ie, basing the AR on the work itself), or would you AR 4->3, and 2/3 -> 1, basing the AR on the title's translation history? -- BrianSchweitzer 2007-08-05 22:56:11
I think we should say that liner note/obi strip, or otherwise 'non-tracklist' transl(iter)ations should count as Psuedo-Releases, rather than adding 2 'real' releases representing one physical release. -- Gecks
I agree with Gecks. I'm pretty sure that's describing predominant current practise anyway, but this is one place where stating it explicitly is useful and not just clutter. -- KrazyKiwi
Does anyone else think a relationship for tracks/releases which are actual translations (lyrics and all) of another would be useful? Maybe something like track/release B is a translated {cover} version of track/release A. The {cover} part obviously to distinguish where the original artist records different language versions of their own song (so not a cover) and when another artist covers and translates a song. Or even better still track/release B is a {language} {cover} version of track/release A where language is obviously selected, e.g.: Oui is a French cover version of Yes. I'm not sure if the {cover} attribute would be applicable to releases though (can't image someone translating and covering someone else's album). Of course for translations by a different artist, it could just be added to the options for covers. -- DaveAndrews
This would be nice, as I already put several "cover" AR. on translated songs. But I would prefer "cover in another language" than "translated cover" -- jesus2099 2008-07-10 07:20:12
Although I understand the motivation for this, I believe that making language an attribute of the cover relationship is the wrong way to go about this. The language that a song (or track) is in is a property of the song or track, not the cover relationship. There was a discussion of this on musicbrainz-style mailing list in 2006, I think, and I gave the reasons this approach did not make sense then. The right solution is for tracks (or better, works, in the Next Generation Schema) to have a language property, just as albums do now (tracks/works would not need to have a script property, just language) except that where the album language/script refer to the representation of title information, the track/work language would refer to the language of the lyrics (if any). With this information, it is quite straightforward to see that a cover is a translation (or not). I'm not 100% sure that a language property for works is in the NGS documents, but if it is not, it should be. @alex
I agree. No to language on AR. -- jesus2099 2008-07-10 16:14:58
Well maybe not for covers. But where a single artist releases a song in two different languages, right now, if I'm not mistaken, there's no way to link them together. You could maybe use "earliest version" or similar, but that's not exactly ideal. My main motivation wasn't for covers, but for where an artist records their own song or album in multiple languages, which some artists regularly do. A good example for this would be Laura Pausini, who has released all her recent studio albums in Spanish and Italian with identical arrangements and tracklists, just differing lyrics, but there's no way to mark that this albums or tracks are (essentially) identical. -- DaveAndrews