I have noticed that translations for episode titles are not displayed on the website.
Using this show as an example... https://www.themoviedb.org/tv/1437-firefly?language=sv-SE
Episode titles have a translation as seen in this image... https://i.ibb.co/8X8cHGd/firefly2.jpg
But the website still shows the English title as shown in this image... https://i.ibb.co/K5gpSNc/firefly1.jpg
Further, the API returns the translation in the episode title, which then causes confusion to some Kodi users wanting to know where these episode titles are coming from... https://i.ibb.co/mtX7T7V/firefly.jpg
Is this intentional or is a fix required?
Can't find a movie or TV show? Login to create it.
Want to rate or add this item to a list?
Not a member?
Reply by superboy97
on January 16, 2021 at 12:54 AM
This is not a real episode title, but just the translation of the English words "Episode 1".
In that case, the website fallback to the English titles.
The fallback is only on the site, not in the API.
Reply by pkscout
on January 16, 2021 at 1:58 AM
It would be nice if the API behaved like the web site, or at least behaved consistently over at least some relatively long period of time. A couple months ago, if you selected a non-English language and there was no "native" episode name, then the API returned "Episode" and a number. So I coded the Kodi TV show scraper to look for a string starting with "Episode" and knew to grab the English episode title as a fall back when another language was selected. Then it changed and the episode title was NULL if there wasn't a translation. So I updated the scraper for those two cases. Now the API returns the native language translation for "Episode" with a number. So now there is basically no way (short of finding every translation you have and keeping it in an array) to tell if an episode has a translation or not. So now the scraper returns the generic episode numbering if someone selects something other than English as their language. Which is really a shame.
Reply by KarellenX
on January 16, 2021 at 2:27 PM
Yes I agree pkscout
Most users won't know about API and how to check the results. They will do the right thing by coming to the website trying to figure out where these spurious titles are coming from, can't find them then blame the Kodi scrapers.
Reply by Tobby
on January 20, 2021 at 11:01 AM
What is the intension with it working this way? Why shouldn't the episode title fall back to English in the API when every other category of metadata does? And why should the site's and the API's result differ?
Are we (contributors) supposed to copy the English title of every episode to every language which doesn't have its own translated titles? It seems highly ineffective when the API could simply fall back to english just like the site does. Not to mention far fetched to happen when it isn't even immediatly apparent to the user if it's done or not because of the sites own fallback function. I'm confused why you would want it to work this way.
Reply by Travis Bell
on January 20, 2021 at 11:34 AM
Fallbacks are a relatively new feature on the website and have not made their way to the API. You can see the open ticket to bring this to the API here. When that ticket gets completed, this will be a configurable option.
Reply by Tobby
on January 20, 2021 at 4:16 PM
I see. Thank you.
Reply by Tobby
on January 16, 2022 at 4:45 AM
Is there any progress on this? Checking Trello it doesn't look like it, but I just don't understand why everything except episode titles can roll back to English. It seems to work on everything else already, including episode descriptions, so why are these generic episode titles the default?
Reply by pkscout
on January 16, 2022 at 6:34 AM
I get asked about this probably once a month or so on the Kodi forum. I really wish the API update would make it to the top of the list so we could provide the data via the API the same way it is on the web site.
Reply by sallenko
on February 28, 2024 at 3:50 PM
Hi Travis Is there any chance that you will implement this function in the near future? This would really help. My only option now is copying episodes title in english to other languages to not get ”episode 1, 2, 3 etc”. I just saw that it was moved back to backlog. Thanks again.
Reply by Travis Bell
on February 28, 2024 at 3:58 PM
Hi @sallenko,
There aren't any immediate plans to bring fallbacks to the API at this time.
Reply by sallenko
on February 28, 2024 at 6:01 PM
I would very much appreciate if you could prioritize this a bit. There are quite a few non-english speakers just copying english episode names to there own language, exactly like I do because of this issue. Thanks again.