In some countries (especially in Spain) it was/is custom to translate titles of songs and print them on the sleeve (sometimes without the original title). The cool thing about this is that these releases have unique sleeves and labels. One example is Queen's "Hot Space", which was translated to "Espacio Caliente".
Frequently songs are also covered in a different language than the original and given a new title. From a collector point of view this could be interesting: there are actually people who collect covers of specific songs.
The challenge is that if only the translated title is printed on the release (or entered in Discogs) it is harder to find out which track it actually is. For regular releases (where the title simply has been translated) it is usually not that difficult. But, for cover versions it can be.
How to indicate translations has been the matter of debate inside Discogs. At some point the solution was to enter both the original title and translated title, and put a "=" in between them. Bother are then recorded in either the title field (for the entire release), or track field (for individual tracks).
Personally I am quite unhappy with this, as markup and data was basically squashed together. When looking at the data coming from Discogs I will not be able to see programmatically if the "=" is a separator or if it is actually part of the title or track name (such as the second track on Slipknot's Iowa album) and it would mean that I would have to either verify manually, cross reference with other releases, or add all kinds of exceptions. This is not something I want to do.
It would have been much better if a separate "translation separator" would have been introduced, as then there would be a little bit more metadata available to indicate that some text had been translated. In other parts of Discogs (such as artists) there are already some separators available, so it is not an entirely new concept. Having this metadata would also have made it much easier to introduce searches such as "give me all releases that have a translated version of a song by The Beatles".
Missed opportunity.
Frequently songs are also covered in a different language than the original and given a new title. From a collector point of view this could be interesting: there are actually people who collect covers of specific songs.
The challenge is that if only the translated title is printed on the release (or entered in Discogs) it is harder to find out which track it actually is. For regular releases (where the title simply has been translated) it is usually not that difficult. But, for cover versions it can be.
How to indicate translations has been the matter of debate inside Discogs. At some point the solution was to enter both the original title and translated title, and put a "=" in between them. Bother are then recorded in either the title field (for the entire release), or track field (for individual tracks).
Personally I am quite unhappy with this, as markup and data was basically squashed together. When looking at the data coming from Discogs I will not be able to see programmatically if the "=" is a separator or if it is actually part of the title or track name (such as the second track on Slipknot's Iowa album) and it would mean that I would have to either verify manually, cross reference with other releases, or add all kinds of exceptions. This is not something I want to do.
It would have been much better if a separate "translation separator" would have been introduced, as then there would be a little bit more metadata available to indicate that some text had been translated. In other parts of Discogs (such as artists) there are already some separators available, so it is not an entirely new concept. Having this metadata would also have made it much easier to introduce searches such as "give me all releases that have a translated version of a song by The Beatles".
Missed opportunity.
Comments
Post a Comment