What's going on with the titles making the Hepburn titles the main one?

[radstylix]

I just noticed some of the series I've been reading have started using the Hepburn titles instead of the English ones?

Is there a bug going on, or a new rule or something?

Sorry if it's the wrong thread for this... but non-JP readers (most of us) can't memorize all of the stuff we read in Japanese.

 

[Manko-sensei]

Manga-bloody-dex strikes again.

I don't even see the point of this whole change(more so after reading this section),English is the language,it's the whole reason most of us are even here.

Anyone who says otherwise has clearly forgotten how many nations were once British colonies and what the international language that the Internet also uses wholesale.

And if the last poll was 14 bloody years ago,then why not use your oh so handy add-space to announce a new poll and actually get some tangible data!

It'd be as simple as just forcing scanlators,who are already making the translations,to put in the English/whatever language they're translating into alongside the original language of the title,then forcibly displaying the most recent English(if applicable)title,with any subversions displayed at the side...basically,not much different from what has already been done.

Even if the language the scanlator is translating into isn't English,someone reading it can still remember the name better then a Japanese one(unless there's no way to translate it)and even more so languages with even crazier systems.

As for evidence for how bad it is,one can type the English title in Danbooru for a series,and unless they've set it up to detect it,you won't get the result,even if the English title is clearly more well known.

Well,regardless,here's hoping whatever spaghetti code the devs be boiling doesn't overflow the damn pot and burn us even more.

If you start justifying everything with old imperialism arguments you'll only get a coalition against you, because this is obviously a conspiration against monolingual English folks to learn a second language. And maybe you can even think of this as an act of revenge, but English in manga is just like any other language: a translated one, henceforth a secondary language. That's why using the romanised version of the titles on a site that values all languages equally is the only logical way to respect both the original works and site users. So I'm sorry to burst your bubble but there's life outside the anglosphere.

 

[Angry_Panda]

So I'm sorry to burst your bubble but there's life outside the anglosphere.

Spoiler: My reaction to this claim

 

[NARESH4444]

If you start justifying everything with old imperialism arguments you'll only get a coalition against you, because this is obviously a conspiration against monolingual English folks to learn a second language. And maybe you can even think of this as an act of revenge, but English in manga is just like any other language: a translated one, henceforth a secondary language. That's why using the romanised version of the titles on a site that values all languages equally is the only logical way to respect both the original works and site users. So I'm sorry to burst your bubble but there's life outside the anglosphere.

The sheer irony that you fail to recognise that English is,again,the INTERNATIONAL LANGUAGE.

You literally can't get more equal value then the language the whole world agrees on(Esperanto failed),more so the world wide web you are currently using.

Someone being online and NOT able to read enough English is either a child,limited in scope to what they actually browse,some hill billy from the sticks who never gets connection,has terrible education,lives in a terrible country where they have much bigger concerns then trying to recall a Jap comic title,and/or all the above in various combos.

This world exists with English as the most important language,and each generation of first and second world nations has more English capability by the time tertiary education occurs,having it as a second language is the default,not an excuse to justify ones' lack of skill in something far more important then their own language.

Time and time again,they try to weezle out of their obvious skill issues without personal growth,instead of realising the simple,objective,and factual truth.

And you want respect?,on a comic piracy site that was butchered by landlubbers,leaving 7000+ souls for Davy Jones' gym locker?,lay off the rum and use your telescope for once!

The English titles were,are,and forever will be far superior then forcing the original Romanised ones since this is an international website that runs on the international language,English!

BTW,everything we run on today is an anglosphere influence,just because decades and even centuries have past,doesn't mean you can just queitly ignore the historical impact of a British colonial noble pointing on a map and saying "this is mine now" nor the every present influence from the biggest colony to ever bust free with harbour tea.

 

[Angry_Panda]

[...]recognise[...]

[...]realising[...]

[...]Romanised[...]

You might want to check your spellings before you get cut down to...



...size.

Here's a fun study to back that up.

At any rate, while the modern lingua franca is in fact English in its various forms, since this site hosts translations in a wide variety of languages, why would they give priority to a particular language's translations rather than the original titles in a web-friendly Romanized format? Your (singular) math ain't mathing, but your (non-'U'-containing) colors are showing.

 

[NARESH4444]

You might want to check your spellings before you get cut down to...



...size.

Here's a fun study to back that up.

At any rate, while the modern lingua franca is in fact English in its various forms, since this site hosts translations in a wide variety of languages, why would they give priority to a particular language's translations rather than the original titles in a web-friendly Romanized format? Your (singular) math ain't mathing, but your (non-'U'-containing) colors are showing.

Because,again,international language.

It literally can't get any more simple then that.

Hosting multiple languages changes nothing compared to the fact that the one language that works is English,and it works because it was put into place specifically for these cross border interactions,has been for far longer then even the internet.

Made easier by all those former colonies.

One can scanlate into whatever language they want from whatever language they want,if they want to actually interact with the world at large through 1s and 0s,English is something they simply must have,and with how the titles were handled previously,that was the truth being put to good work.

And this before we even talk about all those official chapter uploads from the official English publishers.

Why further divide things through more complication when we can unite it through the simple use of the language that works?

 

[Manko-sensei]

Because,again,international language.

It literally can't get any more simple then that.

Hosting multiple languages changes nothing compared to the fact that the one language that works is English,and it works because it was put into place specifically for these cross border interactions,has been for far longer then even the internet.

Made easier by all those former colonies.

One can scanlate into whatever language they want from whatever language they want,if they want to actually interact with the world at large through 1s and 0s,English is something they simply must have,and with how the titles were handled previously,that was the truth being put to good work.

And this before we even talk about all those official chapter uploads from the official English publishers.

Why further divide things through more complication when we can unite it through the simple use of the language that works?

Well, it seems the almighty trading language can't win against a simple pirating site, so... maybe you should adapt to a new environment. It'll be helpful when you go abroad and discover that reality is not that simplistic, specially when you'll need to learn some words and sentences to get what you want. But well, this is going off-topic so let's leave it at that.

 

[OisE]

Anyone who says otherwise has clearly forgotten how many nations were once British colonies

Unlucky for you , but my country was never British!

 

[OisE]

Hosting multiple languages changes nothing compared to the fact that the one language that works is English,and it works because it was put into place specifically for these cross border interactions,has been for far longer then even the internet.

Ah, to be dumb.

 

[NARESH4444]

Well, it seems the almighty trading language can't win against a simple pirating site, so... maybe you should adapt to a new environment. It'll be helpful when you go abroad and discover that reality is not that simplistic, specially when you'll need to learn some words and sentences to get what you want. But well, this is going off-topic so let's leave it at that.

Reality is that simple.

Malaysia,Singapore,Thailand,Cambodia,Indonesia,The Philipines,even Goddamn India,it's pretty amazing how many former colonies of various European powers exist,and how many of them have English education so well that an English speaking tourist can get most things dealt with.

There's clearly a underestimation of how important English is,and how much better the first and second world nations are in using them.

Unlucky for you but my country was never British!

Ah, to be dumb.

And that's supposed to be come back how?

Does your nation NOT use English?

Then why are you here,typing in it?,using Google translate,mayhaps?

The only way your point would work is if you couldn't use a lick of English,and therefore,wouldn't even be capable of making this half-arsed argument of yours.

 

[Manko-sensei]

Reality is that simple.

Malaysia,Singapore,Thailand,Cambodia,Indonesia,The Philipines,even Goddamn India,it's pretty amazing how many former colonies of various European powers exist,and how many of them have English education so well that an English speaking tourist can get most things dealt with.

There's clearly a underestimation of how important English is,and how much better the first and second world nations are in using them.


And that's supposed to be come back how?

Does your nation NOT use English?

Then why are you here,typing in it?,using Google translate,mayhaps?

The only way your point would work is if you couldn't use a lick of English,and therefore,wouldn't even be capable of making this half-arsed argument of yours.

Sure supremacist-kun, it's really helpful learning the bare minimum to rip-off burger-spam tourists. Now you're dismissed.

 

[NARESH4444]

Sure supremacist-kun, it's really helpful learning the bare minimum to rip-off burger-spam tourists. Now you're dismissed.

I see,you think that just because I say English,which is objectively THE language that should be the priority,the very one you're using to type this,that makes me some sort of political agenda seeker?

Arguing the fact that English has been good enough for decades and gets better in first and second world nations with each n' every tertiary graduate who gets pumped out,that makes me the supremacist?

How blind can you even get at this point?

Your hypocrissy is astounding.

 

[OisE]

If we follow your half-arsed logic, the website should be written in chinese.

Everybody will speak chinese soon, so we should be only friendly to chinese speaking users because that how the world will work.

 

[mmosimca]

This conversation has become markedly less civil since I last looked at it, which is unfortunate. Also, at least when I was posting on the first page about "English" titles having preference, I was referring to "insert language you have the UI set to" titles having preference. It just made sense to use English as an example because that is what we are currently speaking.

I personally believe people should see titles in their own language by default and in the author's language (or a chosen Romanization) as an opt-in option. I think that makes the most sense and is the least jarring change.

Anyway, I said what I wanted to say about that already. I've noticed 4 more CN titles in my list switch over in the last two days. Two have the diacritics, and two are stripped of diacritics (https://mangadex.org/title/bf40d55a-0adc-41ca-953c-a9feb42a0d5f/tou-xiang and https://mangadex.org/title/d0d55fc8-56c3-4cf1-9b00-d6534255cc15/tingwen-taihou-he-taihou-shi-zhen-de). So there might be some inconsistency in title changes around diacritics going on. Should I report ones without diacritics that I run across via "Incorrect information in entry" and mention it or would that just spam the mods excessively?

Edit: reduced excessive text

 

[Bartolumiu]

Why are you guys doing manual labor where automation should make more sense?

Who says it's manually done? Sure, most of it is actually manual, but we're automating it as much as we can (hell, we're not going to manually verify ~100k entries where ~30-40% of them are already with romanisations correctly set)

Why do you even need to work on the MainTitle column, when it should be obsoleted and switched over to an entry derived from OG language + title (or - better yet - an additional mark for OriginalTitle)?

Backend devs complaining about the changes we were requesting being possible to do with the current schema (yep, the original idea was to do a rework of the titles attribute to be able to mark titles as official or unofficial, but sadly the idea got rejected).

Why are you making it hard on yourselves and the users?

It's a temporary annoyance until it's 100% done. Once we finish, it'll be a better experience in general (or at least we hope it will).

Why is this being done on live data instead of being done on additional, not-user-visible fields?

There are no invisible fields sadly, so we need to apply the changes directly on the actual public data...

 

[Bartolumiu]

Also, at least when I was posting on the first page about "English" titles having preference, I was referring to "insert language you have the UI set to" titles having preference. It just made sense to use English as an example because that is what we are currently speaking.

No worries, that was actually the plan we had (either based on UI language, or via the request headers to the API the browser sends with every request, unless the user has an active override via settings).

I personally believe people should see titles in their own language by default and in the author's language (or a chosen Romanization) as an opt-in option. I think that makes the most sense and is the least jarring change.

We're still not 100% sure on how we're going to do the transition, but it's either that or along with the planned "onboarding screen" to let users select the preferred title versions (idea still in a really early stage, will probably undergo multiple changes before hitting prod).

Anyway, I said what I wanted to say about that already. I've noticed 4 more CN titles in my list switch over in the last two days. Two have the diacritics, and two are stripped of diacritics (https://mangadex.org/title/bf40d55a-0adc-41ca-953c-a9feb42a0d5f/tou-xiang and https://mangadex.org/title/d0d55fc8-56c3-4cf1-9b00-d6534255cc15/tingwen-taihou-he-taihou-shi-zhen-de). So there might be some inconsistency in title changes around diacritics going on. Should I report ones without diacritics that I run across via "Incorrect information in entry" and mention it or would that just spam the mods excessively?

Ideally chinese romanisations should have the tonal accents, so yeah, if you can please report them (or just send them via my DMs over here or on Discord if you prefer doing so), since our search system can handle them accordingly (it treats characters like è, é, or ê as e when looking up things, so there'll be no issues).

Thanks for letting us know about that though! (fixed the ones you mentioned in this message too)

 

[SGR]

Who says it's manually done? Sure, most of it is actually manual, (...)

Inference. Not that difficult, considering the symptoms. And absolutely justified, considering your response.

Backend devs complaining about the changes we were requesting being possible to do with the current schema (yep, the original idea was to do a rework of the titles attribute to be able to mark titles as official or unofficial, but sadly the idea got rejected).

(...)

There are no invisible fields sadly, so we need to apply the changes directly on the actual public data...

Ahh. There's the rub. Someone decided that Good Architecture and Proper Feature Implementations should give way to "we're afraid to touch the backend". This almost makes me want to go into the codebase myself and fix it for ya, but it's never that simple (both in terms of compliance and in terms of what's truly there).

 

[Bartolumiu]

Ahh. There's the rub. Someone decided that Good Architecture and Proper Feature Implementations should give way to "we're afraid to touch the backend". This almost makes me want to go into the codebase myself and fix it for ya, but it's never that simple (both in terms of compliance and in terms of what's truly there).

I mean, one of the arguments they gave was about not wanting to break third party apps, which kind of makes sense, but also it's not a good idea to block possible improvements for the website just because there might be unmaintained projects relying on parts of the API we want to update and/or deprecate in favour of better changes and features.
Also, if I were you I wouldn't want to touch neither frontend or backend code even with a 20km pole... I did, and that thing definitely took a toll on my sanity...