Some artists have vastly different name or song title when they're translated purely based on their own or their label's preference, compared to what would it be if it's romanised. One of the extreme case would be Emille's Moonlight Serenade, where it's ping-ponged from using romanisation, to translation, and back to romanisation again, without citing the official romanisation, despite the first ranked Emille's beatmap uses correct official metadata for romanised field to the translated ones, and dated almost 2 years before the FA announcement. These beatmaps which uses direct romanisation directly violated this rule since these maps fail to provide official romanisation:
Where do we draw the line to differentiate "unofficial" romanisation to official romanisation? The current RC for metadata seems to fail honoring official metadata and feels a bit forced by peer to use unofficial metadata according to these guidelines:
From what I see in Ranked beatmap listing, it seems that the guidelines are the ones that are followed by most mappers, as they completely disregarding the official metadata to be presented on romanised field. This also recently happened to me on the map (outside of FA) Close to gray, where the modders fail to provide me official source of the romanisation, and pushing me to use unofficial romanisation for the sake of these guidelines. Do note that romanised field allows translated metadata if there is a source that backs up the claim.

We need to treat self-made romanisation without proper source as unofficial, and enforce honoring official metadata first since we already have the rules. Then, only if both official romanised and translated metadata present, we can fall back to this guideline:

I would like for a clarification, and hopefully revision regarding these metadata RCs.

personally i think giving mappers the choice to use whatever option is available, stuff that is allowed by the RC and from officials, is the best way to go imo.

Some would like to honor official translations if available, others would prefer to stay with unofficial romanisations (in hepburn) for the sake of honoring the media where it originated. as long as both option brought up the same results when searched, it generally should be fine.

we should be able to choose what metadata option fit best even when the officials are given, as long as the official sources did not state something completely different. Although its also a bit ambiguous on what constitutes as "completely different"

the priority would be smth like this


Additionally, this one
could be deleted, as this is particularly one of the RC that sparks the whole ambiguity.

Isn't this the same topic or at least very closely related to community/forums/topics/1670642 ?

Ryu Sei wrote:

Some artists have vastly different name or song title when they're translated purely based on their own or their label's preference, compared to what would it be if it's romanised. One of the extreme case would be Emille's Moonlight Serenade, where it's ping-ponged from using romanisation, to translation, and back to romanisation again, without citing the official romanisation, despite the first ranked Emille's beatmap uses correct official metadata for romanised field to the translated ones, and dated almost 2 years before the FA announcement. These beatmaps which uses direct romanisation directly violated this rule since these maps fail to provide official romanisation:

Primary metadata sources must be used as references for metadata. Do not modify metadata from primary sources except to comply with formatting and standardisation rules below. If no sources are available, use what is most common and recognisable.

Where do we draw the line to differentiate "unofficial" romanisation to official romanisation? The current RC for metadata seems to fail honoring official metadata and feels a bit forced by peer to use unofficial metadata according to these guidelines:

General

1. If multiple metadata options are available, priority should be given to the option which is most easily recognisable and traceable back to the original song or source. Official romanisations and translations are preferred for romanised fields so long as they are easily found and commonly recognised.

Standardisation

1. If the same song exists in the Ranked or Loved sections already, the metadata should be followed unless it breaks other rules in the ranking criteria or the official sources state something completely different.
2. Artist names should be consistent between different songs from the same person or group in the Ranked or Loved sections. This does not apply if the person or group intentionally uses a different alias for different song or album releases.

From what I see in Ranked beatmap listing, it seems that the guidelines are the ones that are followed by most mappers, as they completely disregarding the official metadata to be presented on romanised field. This also recently happened to me on the map (outside of FA) Close to gray, where the modders fail to provide me official source of the romanisation, and pushing me to use unofficial romanisation for the sake of these guidelines. Do note that romanised field allows translated metadata if there is a source that backs up the claim.

We need to treat self-made romanisation without proper source as unofficial, and enforce honoring official metadata first since we already have the rules. Then, only if both official romanised and translated metadata present, we can fall back to this guideline:

If multiple metadata options are available, priority should be given to the option which is most easily recognisable and traceable back to the original song or source. Official romanisations and translations are preferred for romanised fields so long as they are easily found and commonly recognised.

I would like for a clarification, and hopefully revision regarding these metadata RCs.

I think the first rule about primary metadata sources mainly affects the unicode fields and not necessarily the romanised fields because primary metadata sources don't always provide romanisations or translations if they are written in non-latin characters. In fact, most songs don't have official romanisations/translations. For that reason, there is no part of the RC that states romanisations must be official. There is only the clause about official romanisations being preferred in the guideline about multiple available options, but I think that sentence should be removed anyway.

See this post from the other thread mentioned above for more detailed reasoning.

Rivals_7 wrote:

personally i think giving mappers the choice to use whatever option is available, stuff that is allowed by the RC and from officials, is the best way to go imo.

Some would like to honor official translations if available, others would prefer to stay with unofficial romanisations (in hepburn) for the sake of honoring the media where it originated. as long as both option brought up the same results when searched, it generally should be fine.

we should be able to choose what metadata option fit best even when the officials are given, as long as the official sources did not state something completely different. Although its also a bit ambiguous on what constitutes as "completely different"

the priority would be smth like this


Additionally, this one

If the same song exists in the Ranked or Loved sections already, the metadata should be followed unless it breaks other rules in the ranking criteria or the official sources state something completely different.

could be deleted, as this is particularly one of the RC that sparks the whole ambiguity.

If the guideline about consistency is deleted and mappers can freely choose to use whatever metadata they want, there would be many different maps of the same song/artist with different metadata which would just be an even bigger mess than right now.

This priority table also doesn't make much sense because there is no such thing as "unofficial translations". You can't self-translate a song title or artist name, or at least that's not allowed according to the RC.

The presence of official romanisation also warrants not just the words and writing, but also the capitalisation of the said artist/title field. That's why I want to know at which degree unofficial romanisations are prioritised.

One of the example of official romanisation would be artist name ChibaNyan (チバニャン), since they prefer their name to be written as that rather than how the standardisation will do (Chibanyan, Chiba-nyan).

If there are official romanisation, it's obvious which one to use. The problem is when there are only official translation. Which one are prioritised between unofficial romanisation vs. official translation?

Ryu Sei called me here. Unofficial romanization is sometimes a case-by-case matter, so I'll just share how the BNG considered which title should follow the primary and which was not.

The BN should track which title(or the artist name) the artists want it to be named. But if the song was tied to some sort of contest or game (not the album), usually the artist field and the title field should be written by following the primary official names, not the latest names.

The artist field or the title of the song being changed by the change of their will should be respected, but only for the unofficial products such as the songs that were not tied to something valid to be counted as a source.


Thus, songs from games, contests, etc should follow the primary source's information. The other, unofficial romanization, such as songs from single EP or Albums, which were not tied to the official contest or something, the metadata should respect the artist's, title's latest romanization, no matter if there was the same song in the ranked section.