Japanese vs Chinese characters

drbits wrote 9 years ago: 1

On http://www.tvmaze.com/faq/13/shows heading Names

"This mainly happens with - Japanese - anime shows, which can have a name in the Chinese/Kanji character set (like "進撃の巨人"), ..."

Does this mean that Kanji (traditional Japanese symbols) or Romaji (phonetic transliteration of katakana using the Latin character set) are acceptable, but not Katakana (phonetic transliteration of kanji using Japanese symbols)? What about shows that have an original name in katakana or hiragana (a simplified katakana)? According to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kanji, kanji is used less than phonetic writing. There are approximately 50,000 kanji glyphs, but only 2000-3000 are common and just over 1000 are universally known in Japan.

I assume that this also applies to Chinese which has about 85,000 hanzi glyphs, but only scholars know more than around 4000 glyphs. Each glyph is either a noun or noun concept. Other parts of speech are inferred by the reader and older writings usually lack punctuation. The People's Republic of China (mainland China) has standardized simplified glyphs to speed writing of common words. The phonetic version of hanzi is known as Pinyin and written with the latin alphabet and French-like accent marks.

gazza911 wrote 9 years ago: 1

From the FAQ: "When this is the case, the English or transliterated name takes precedence over the Kanji version".

I would assume that this also applies to any type of symbolic language, in that you only use the symbolic language as the main title if and only if there is no official transliterated/translated title available.

david wrote 9 years ago: 1

For the purposes of our policy, you can consider Romaji or Katakana the same as Chinese/Kanji: if there is an official name available in a Latin character set, it takes precedence.

horizon wrote 9 years ago: 1

In Japan, names are ordered last name first, but names are typically Firstname/Lastname are written in Europe and US.

In what order we should write Japanese names on TVmaze?

david wrote 9 years ago: 1

As close to the "original" as possible. If an actor is - nearly - always credited with his last name listed first, follow that. :)