Can I have a question? Do you have any advice as to where can I search if a movie or series have official translation?

TMDB的存在意义应该是为了广大爱好者设立的，而不是一个为了官方口号的DB系统吧，锁标题修改权限，还不让人写中文翻译，你哪些很多内容中文翻译都是爱好者来的，不是你翻译的。

Do you have any advice as to where can I search if a movie or series have official translation?

That's a great question. As far as I know, we manually search for evidence of release. But does the Chinese government or any independent entity keep a record of content released in the country?

@banana_girl said:

Do you have any advice as to where can I search if a movie or series have official translation?

That's a great question. As far as I know, we manually search for evidence of release. But does the Chinese government or any independent entity keep a record of content released in the country?

那就请你关闭所有人的编辑权限，改为你们自己TMDB或者制作方官方编辑渠道来维护吧，因为TMDB是不允许爱好者来维护非官方信息。

@banana_girl said:

Do you have any advice as to where can I search if a movie or series have official translation?

That's a great question. As far as I know, we manually search for evidence of release. But does the Chinese government or any independent entity keep a record of content released in the country?

My question wasn't about Chinese release at all and I don't think hadeser asked about that too.

Should I just search in Google? How should I do it?

There's another question: if one part of the title has an official translation but the other one hasn't, what should I do?

I still don't understand why there can't be an option to add an unofficial title and mark it as such? Why such a function can't be developed at least in the future?

Hello again. I've noticed that several times when unofficially translated titles were removed and display titles were locked blank, unofficially translated titles were immediately added as alternate by the same mod. Does it mean they are allowed to be added as alternate?

@Allosaurus said:

Hello again. I've noticed that several times when unofficially translated titles were removed and display titles were locked blank, unofficially translated titles were immediately added as alternate by the same mod. Does it mean they are allowed to be added as alternate?

It's a bit of a 'chicken or the egg' question. Alternative titles are allowed as long as the title is in use. So one could argue that if the titles were available on here, they were in use, and could therefore be added as alternative titles.

Yes... that's pretty confusing.

By that, do you mean that if an unofficial title is widely used (for example, by unofficial dubs, sites, databases etc.), it's allowed to be added as an alternative, but for example if the movie isn't well-known in my country and I was the one who added an unofficial title to TMDb (when I didn't know unofficial translations aren't allowed), such translation isn't allowed to be added as alternative title. Is that correct or I am misunderstanding something?

Also, would that mean any incorrect translations or even made-up titles that are used widely are allowed as alternative, but not correct ones if they aren't widely used?

@Allosaurus said:

Yes... that's pretty confusing.

By that, do you mean that if an unofficial title is widely used (for example, by unofficial dubs, sites, databases etc.), it's allowed to be added as an alternative, but for example if the movie isn't well-known in my country and I was the one who added an unofficial title to TMDb (when I didn't know unofficial translations aren't allowed), such translation isn't allowed to be added as alternative title. Is that correct or I am misunderstanding something?

Also, would that mean any incorrect translations or even made-up titles that are used widely are allowed as alternative, but not correct ones if they aren't widely used?

It's a judgement call by the moderator. So maybe we should wait to see what other mods have to say. I personally think it can be helpful to keep such a title, but it all depends on the specific case.

Okay, I see.

I'm jumping on this topic. I'm a new editor, I was getting tired of seeing the mess on tmdb for older chinese films, so I started mass editing these days.

I'm working on the English translation of Chinese films. But a lot of chinese movies never had any international distribution. They only have a chinese title. The accepted "english" title is the romanized title, using pinyin (the most common standard for romanization of chinese language). It's what IMDB uses, as well. And... well I believe this practice is dumb.

Pinyin titles, really? "Xiao Ci Wei Zou Ming Qu"for 小刺猬奏鸣曲? Who wants such a title? Who can remember them? Maybe as an alternative title, for people who want to learn a bit of chinese... But not at the main english title. My movie database is filled with titles like that. These pinyin titles are not official either. For this movie, we could use an unofficial translation, "Hedgehog Sonata", or anything else until there is some kind of official English release. Many chinese pages on the movie do use that unofficial english translation already, as a quick google search can show.

Can we at least add these unofficial titles in the alternative titles page? From this thread, it sounds like it's forbidden as well? I mean... why? Just to follow some arbitrary rules that someone somewhere decided years ago?

Edit: I've only started editing films here for a few days. I did add plenty of unofficial titles. I will keep adding them in the alternative title page, even though I think they'd be perfectly suited for the main translated title... And if they are forbidden even in the alt titles, well then sorry if I forget about the rules sometimes...

In case it was missed, note that the translated title mandate is only about readability. Most mods can't read original Chinese. It's the same for Greek, Russian, Bulgarian etc, so not only Chinese films. English is the default working language on TMDb and the Latin alphabet is needed for the site to work.

Second, let's say that you add your own translated titles. Next week another user adds their translated titles. And on and on we go until it becomes a huge mess. Unofficial titles are not wanted. Since your titles aren't "in use" anywhere, they should not be added as alternative titles either. Again, would it be helpful to you if there were 20 different unofficial English titles added as alternative titles for a movie? I kindly ask you to stop this practice now.

I understand the risks of allowing unofficial titles, but I believe the pros far outweigh the cons. Letting editors with knowledge of that specific language/niche/movie decide what is best, and only when disputes arrise should mods get involved. In 99% of cases, there won't be any dispute, and users will have readable titles at their fingertips. I know tmdb is a private company, but this is the closest thing we have to an effective open movie database (like musicbrainz is for the music). The rules ought to be more flexible for general purpose, and stricter for more "mainstream" pages. It is kind of the way wikipedia works.

I'm just a nobody, only been editing a few days (although I've been using tmdb for years). I have been curating my own database for years, adding my own metadata when tmdb/imdb is wrong or incomplete. I thought it would be nice to add all this missing metadata on here too. One of my goals was to add readable English titles for my chinese/japanese/indian/iranian (and so on) movies. Now I discover that unofficial titles are against the rules, it kinda kills it.

@ouafouaf said:

I'm just a nobody, only been editing a few days (although I've been using tmdb for years). I have been curating my own database for years, adding my own metadata when tmdb/imdb is wrong or incomplete. I thought it would be nice to add all this missing metadata on here too. One of my goals was to add readable titles for my chinese/japanese/indian/iranian (and so on) movies. Now I discover that unofficial titles are against the rules, it kinda kills it.

Thanks for wanting to contribute and for contributing. We appreciate it and we need it, but a key for things to work smoothly on TMDb is that users follow the rules. We want users to operate within the rules without needing babysitting (meaning a mod being forced to check all their edits all the time). Again, imagine there are 100 other users like yourself, with their own internal system for keeping metadata the way they want. I think that's a reasonable number considering how passionate some of us are about metadata and keeping collections functional. So what would happen if we have a ton of users making daily changes to movies and TV shows to make sure the data fits their own personal system? No, that's not an option for obvious reasons. So even if I know you mean well, the rules are there for a reason.

I beg to differ, The current rules might make life easier for the mods (although you have to deal with annoying users complaining, like me), but I do not believe they are good rules if the goal is to build a high quality movie database. "the rules are there for a reason" is not much of an argument. The truth is that I'm not in a position to have a say in the rules, and I'm free to go somewhere else. Unfortunately, there is no better alternative for me at the moment, so I'll just keep the alt titles to myself, and make sure that my script won't replace my readable titles with tmdb nonsense translated title while I'm importing metadata haha Have a good day, thanks for answering.