Forum - View topicSome suggestions about submitting cast and staff
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dormcat
Encyclopedia Editor
 Posts: 9902 Location: New Taipei City, Taiwan, ROC |
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First of all, I'd like to thank all contributors who have made ANN Encyclopedia improving day by day. I believe whoever tried to submit information are good-natured, but we are human, and human make mistakes. Since all ANN users can read English in varying levels (or you wouldn't be here in the first place, would you?
 ), I'll focus on some advices and tricks on Japanese cast and staff.
The very first step is finding the correct romanization of Japanese characters, either in kanji or kana. Like most Western media, ANN use Hepburn romanization. Although not an international standard anymore (the current ISO 3602 standard is Kunrei-shiki, discussed later), it is still the most commonly used one in Western world, and many well-known Japanese databases use Hepburn as well. Most noticeable difference between Hepburn and Kunrei-shiki are し, つ, ち, しょ (shi, tsu, chi, sho in Hepburn; si, tu, ti, syo in Kunrei-shiki, respectively). Therefore, please translate the information you've found to Hepburn if they were written in Kunrei-shiki. Next, you might find more than one romanization, even if they are all Hepburn. This is, most likely, the old and notorious problem of long vowels, ō and ū. Standard Hepburn uses macrons (as in ō and ū), but they are not in ISO-8859-1 character set, and you have to use Character Map or equivalent to type them. You might also find o and u with circumflexes (ô and û, like in many entries in ANN), but they are not easy to type either. Not using them may cause more confusion (e.g. Yoko is a male name, but Yōko is a female name; o sometimes stands for "small" but ō often stands for "large"). What should we do? I suggest (although not every Encyclopedist may agree) one should follow the sequence for the source of information: 1. Official personal website. Prolific cast or staff often have websites of their own. Information form those sites are endorsed, but some people may use slightly "Westernized" romanization for their given name, e.g. Show HAYAMI and Anne SUZUKI. 2. Official site of agencies/companies. Most seiyuus signed up with an agency, and many agencies maintain such a database. This is also the best place to acquire a good mug shot (photos on personal website are usually artistically rendered) and additional personal information (date of birth, hometown, blood type, hobbies, etc.). Prolific agencies are 81produce, Aoni Production, Aksent, ARTSVISION, Genki Project, Haikyo, Ken Production, Production baobab, Sigma Seven, etc. 3. Furigana (yomigana)  wapuro romaji from official sites. Sometimes even official sites do not provide official romaji, but they always provide furigana for pronunciation purpose for Japanese. To type and translate furigana "as is" using a computer results in "wapuro romaji," or "romanization of word processors." This might not be "official," but the result may be least debatable, since wapuro romaji tells o/oo/ou/u/uu apart without confusion and requires no special letters. If no official romaji available, this is my preferred romanization.
4. Romanization acquired from well-known databases. One of those holy shrines is Seiyuu Database WWW version. Other useful databases are Hatena Diary, .lain news, and Les voix des Anges (no, it's not in French, it's in Japanese). However, information in those site MAY contain minor errors, so be sure to shop around. 5. Fan sites made by fans. There are official fan sites endorsed by the individual and private fan sites made solely by enthusiastic fans. Some of them are no less informative than official sites (such as Ken Akamatsu Works Research Institute), but most of the time information from fan sites are not as credible as sources listed above, so be VERY SURE to compare different sources before submission. 6. Fansub and scanlation sites are not recommended for information, especially for cast / staff. It's not about legality or ANN policy, but because information from those sites are inherently unreliable. Still awake? Good. 
Once you've obtained romaji, retype its kanji using Japanese IME. In most cases you can get the correct kanji picked up by IME, but if you can't, DON'T PANIC. This happens when the kanji is not very common or even obscure. Re-verify your typing and spelling; find more sources if possible. Once you've verified the information, hit the "Verify information" button! If the seiyuu / staff exists and matches his / her previous jobs (in the case of staff members), congratulations! You've finished the first step. If the person does not show up, it could be that you are the very first person to add this piece of information, but it can also be that you've made a mistake. ANN Encyclopedia can pick up o/oo/ou/u/uu problem and misplaced given / family name, but it CAN NOT pick up other forms of typo, so please check your spelling AND browse though People database to see if there are similar spellings. In the case of staff member submission there's one more possibility: the person exists but that person has never done the job you submitted. It is possible that you have created a new job title for him / her. This happens a lot when people want to copy the info verbatim from a fansub. Thus we can see the same person for "Animation Director" and "Chief Animator"; "Series Composition", "Series Construction", and "Series Story Editor"; "Music", "Music Score", and "Original Music"; "Sound Director", "Sound Effects Director", and even "Acoustic Supervision". Here's a *very* brief list about this issue; wish it helps. Once everything has been set, the next step is to add sub-entries for personal information. This will be discussed in another post, if there's some positive feedback.... 
Gotta sleep now.... 
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chris keck
 Posts: 96 Location: Rhode Island, U.S. |
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dormcat,
Excellent job. I'm glad someone at the ANN encyclopedia is giving some thought to heading off errors, rather than just fixing them after the fact. However, I suggest (if you aren't already doing so) that you make these instructions part of the submission process. Wikipedia has a nice submission requirement page that could be used as an example. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Manual_of_Style_for_Japan-related_articles chris keck |
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Samurai CDZ
 Posts: 776 Location: Manhattan, KS |
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I usually pull straight off the US released DVD's or manga, and those companies of course translate their own way. I've been having a bit of trouble with AnimEigo because almost every name it oo, Kyooko, Kooji, etc. More often that not these names are in the database as Kyoko, Koji, etc. (if they are in the database). So following the pattern of the DB, whenever the person I'm adding isn't in there I drop the extra o and enter the data with just the one o (as Kyoko, Koji, etc.). The only time I add two o's is when they are at the beginning of a name (Ooyama, Ooasa), but I've been wondering which way would be the preferred entry, should I use one o, two o's or ō. I've jumped around a bit, but I've settled on the above. |
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Dan42
Chief Encyclopedist
 Posts: 3793 Location: Montreal |
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Actually, here's a list of the typos/alternates that the encyclopedia can pick up: ni / n'i / n-i (in case of shinichi / shin'ichi / shin-ichi) o / oo / ou / oh / ô u / uu / û i / ii / î and now just added: si / shi tu / tsu ti / chi syo / sho I can add more if necessary.
I would *really* like to use the standard Hepburn romanization with macrons, but unfortunately ō and ū are not part of the ISO-8859-1 character set we use. In articles like the wikipedia, it doesn't really matter, but when it comes to searching and sorting, things get hairy. If you search for "Ôtomo", you get "Otomo" in the results because ISO-8859-1 considers Ô and O as equivalent. But if I search for ō, I won't find anything. Trying to store non-ISO characters in a ISO database is futile. We need to switch to UTF-8. Soon.
That's actually a pretty good rule of thumb. Family names that begin with 大 are fairly common and that kanji should generally be romanized as "oo". But for pretty much everything else it should be "o" or "ou". Especially since, in english, "oo" tends to be pronounced as in "fool", which is very different from the Japanese pronunciation (which is why for this special case I tend to like "oh") |
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chris keck
Posts: 96 Location: Rhode Island, U.S. |
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Hello,
Before this post slips too far down the list I’d like to make a few more comments on some of the points that domcat brought up.
This would be much easier if the Given Name-Kanji and Family Name-Kanji fields in the ANN encyclopedia were searchable. I once found a duplicate anime title when I tried to enter an alternative title for one anime in kanji and was told that it already existed in the encyclopedia under a different main title. If the database can do an automatic search to check kanji titles can't a kanji name search function be added? It would be much easier, and reduce the chance for errors, if you didn’t have to reinvent the wheel every time you found a kanji cast/crew listing. Instead of going through the kanji, romanize, verify name, lookup-in-the-encyclopedia and submit process you could search the encyclopedia for the kanji name directly and find out if they are already a known anime worker.
Using the IME is convenient, but it’s also good to have a comprehensive dictionary. Just as Microsoft Word’s spelling checker is convenient I wouldn’t equate it to the OED. I don’t know what is considered the authoritative Japanese-English dictionary, but The Chicago Manual of Style says, “Japanese is usually romanized following the system in Kenkyusha's New Japanese - English Dictionary”. I don’t have a copy of this dictionary so I can’t comment on it from firsthand experience. Plus, it has the disadvantage of being a book and being very expensive (Amazon lists it for US$495). One good software dictionary I can recommend is the JEDict by Sergey Kurkin. http://jedict.com/ At US$25 it’s inexpensive and it has the advantage of being computer based so you can copy and paste directly from webpages. Enamdic, the Japanese name dictionary it uses, contains over 350,000 names. This page has links to other Japanese-English software and resources. http://www.csse.monash.edu.au/~jwb/japanese.html
Actually, circumflexes can be entered easily (compared to macrons anyway). That’s probably why you see them so often. Just type option-i, [vowel]. That is, press the option and i keys together, release, then press the key for the vowel you want to cirucmflexulize. You can also store often-used characters in the favorites pane of the character pallet. That way if you need to use ō and ū a lot you can access them quickly.
It was my understanding that standard Hepburn does not indicate long vowels and that Modified Hepburn uses macrons (small point). I hope you do expand this into an official ANN encyclopedia style manual. I think it would help greatly to reduce errors and make the listing more consistent. chris keck |
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dormcat
Encyclopedia Editor
Posts: 9902 Location: New Taipei City, Taiwan, ROC |
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I see. You are a Mac user. I should have guessed...
Unfortunately Windows don't have this function built-in, so it may be a problem for most Windows users but not for Mac users. |
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Samurai CDZ
Posts: 776 Location: Manhattan, KS |
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What about Korean cast/staff names? How are they supposed to be properly entered?
First-first-last, or First-last-last On that note, do English companies translate them properly and in the right order? (ie. if a company put JP last names first do they do the same with Korean) I know how I've done it but I don't think it is right and I've seen it done both ways. |
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dormcat
Encyclopedia Editor
Posts: 9902 Location: New Taipei City, Taiwan, ROC |
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The best way would be LAST, First1-First2 or First1-First2 LAST The numbers indicate different characters yet they are both parts of first name. There's no middle name / initial in East Asian names. It is recommended, but not required, that the first letter of second character romanization should be in upper case (capitalized). Having a dash / hyphen is important for a two-part first name, for most Westerners would regard the second part of the first name as a middle name. I had a very unpleasant experience with Californian DMV for they refused to add a hyphen between the two parts of my first name, which was well accepted by federal agencies (INS, Social Security, US consulates), schools, and private companies (such as my bank account). Thus, all my insurance documents either listed my second part of my first name as an initial or simply omitted it. 
NO, and that's really bothersome. This happens in many major media (e.g. CNN) as well, when an East Asian politician appears in their news, if s/he has extensive experience on foreign affairs (foreign minister or similar job) they'll put his/her name as First LAST (especially when the name is an adapted Westernized name), but for a less internationally recognized politician they'd use LAST First, which is the way s/he is called in that country. |
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Samurai CDZ
Posts: 776 Location: Manhattan, KS |
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Crap...I did 'em backwards...I'll fix them at some point and submit them in the duplicate persons thread...at least you'll be able to verify if they are all right or not. I wonder, do you think I should enter Korean cast/staff names from now on or not? I only have the translated DVD credits to go off of. |
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dormcat
Encyclopedia Editor
Posts: 9902 Location: New Taipei City, Taiwan, ROC |
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You should; just be careful. By the way, can this thread be made sticky? It may sound like advertising my own article , but it's a pity to see this thread gets buried by newer threads.
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Samurai CDZ
Posts: 776 Location: Manhattan, KS |
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Yes, please do make it a sticky. I was looking for this kind of info and had to bug dormcat to find it. |
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Tempest
 I Run this place.ANN Publisher  Posts: 10468 Location: Do not message me for support. |
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Done
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DokoMadeMo
 SubscriberEncyclopedia Editor  Posts: 72 Location: Walla Walla, Washington, USA |
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Hello!
I'd like make some suggestions that would probably be useful in reducing duplicate Japanese people being added to the ANN encyclopedia database. If the encyclopedia could somehow automatically detect the following things, it would really help out. "ha" and "ba" (hi/fu{or "hu"}/he/ho bi/bu/be/bo)
"ta" and "da" ["chi/ti" and "ji/di/dzi", "tsu/tu" and "zu/du/dzu", "te" and "de", & "to" and "do"] "ka" and "ga" [ki/ku/ke/ko gi/gu/ge/go]
"sa/shi{or "si"}/su/se/so" "za/ji{or zi}/zu/ze/zo"
plus "cha" & "tya" "chu" & "tyu" "cho" & "tyo" "sha" & "sya" "shu" & "syu" "ja" & "jya" "ju" & "jyu" "jo" & "jyo" This would be especially helpful for the case of, for instance, the last name 中川, which could be read "Nakakawa" or "Nakagawa". Nevertheless, I have noticed that many surnames are usually rendered in only one particular way, whether it be with the voiced consonant [?] or not. In the example I gave, I believe it would be "Nakagawa". I don't know if these suggestions can be put into practical use in the ANN people database, however. Still, I hope they can in some way be implemented. Everyone, thank you so much for creating and continously maintaining this website; I enjoy it thoroughly  
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xuebaochai
 Posts: 85 Location: An unstable world |
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I have just started spoiling your fine encyclopedia with bad entries, and the main problem I have found is finding consistent translations for staff titles. In particular 演出 that seems to be translated differently by every anime website and probably every contributor. I found this list http://www.animelyrics.com/forum/topic_show.pl?pid=250584 from another site, and I wonder if ANN could post a similar list with standardized "site policy" translations for the various task names. I'm thinking on the line of Dormcat-sensei's short list of problem job titles, extended.
Just being annoying, sorry. |
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Michi
Encyclopedia Editor
 Posts: 741 Location: Los Angeles, CA |
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I'd recommend searching the people database a bit. When I add staff names and have no idea what they are, I go and check our people list for the possible readings. If I find a match already in there with matching kanji on the entry then I go ahead and add it. That makes it so there aren't a bunch of random entries or alternate spellings in the database. ^^ |
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