@ouafouaf said:

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.

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? And with mods not being able to lock titles since "anything goes" would be the new standard with your proposed rule change. Also note that the titles added likely wouldn't be the ones you want. There would always be someone else with a much better system changing your titles. So, help me out here, and explain how allowing any title any user can come up with (to be added) would improve the metadata! Have a good day.

Not "anything goes" but "do as you deem fit", trust editors will most often find a common ground. There need to be guidelines, conventions, in a spirit of "best practices", in order to have some coherence. (About that, I feel the bible needs to be a little bit more accessible, the bible search engine doesn't work, but that's another problem.) For example, the bible suggests that editors should respect asian name order when adding english name. Zhang Yimou shouldn't be Yimou Zhang. This kind of rules, I will absolutely agree with, as it avoid incoherence in the data.

When it comes to unofficial titles, it shouldn't be an issue most of the time, and editors can/should add information in the "type" field to inform the user that it is an unofficial title. I believe that for the large majority of the time, it would work fine. In "smaller" movies, some editors are already making a mess anyway, that wouldn't be different. In "larger" movies, when there is a mess or an edit war, the mod can come and block the field, as they do on wikipedia.

_"we have a ton of users making daily changes to movies and TV shows to make sure the data fits their own personal system" _ How so? What could happen? My "Hedgehog Sonata" is an unofficial translation, but it is not a random translation, it is one found on several Chinese websites. And if some user doesn't like my "Hedgehog Sonata" translation, he can add another one, it's ok. Sure, some user can come around and add "Dragon Sonata" or some other nonsense, but that would only happen if the editor wants to mess with the database. How many different translation is too many? Anyway, imo, less policing is better, and the data on tmdb relies on editors good will, after all.

Edit: And since Im still new here, there are rules I don't know about. Over the past few days, I discovered/understood a few rules, they all made sense to me since they were all about consistency. This rule about unofficial titles, on the other hand, is not about consistancy. Another thing: What is the deal with people's name? Check Jackie Chan's alternative names in the English translation, it's a mess. For a lot of Chinese people in the database, I usually use the English transcription as main name, and the original name (with chinese characters) in the alt, as well as different pronounciations for the name if needed (like Chow Yun-Fat can be pronounced Zhou Runfa in mandarin chinese)...

Hello again. I've read new replies to this discussion.

As I said before, I also think unofficial translations should be allowed. Yes, there may be edit wars because of different users trying to add differently translated titles but I think that's better than having Chinese/Japanese titles written in Latin letters. Unfortunately I have no energy to write a long reply right now but I think enough was said. Title is the most important criteria for identifying a movie. A lack of a translation is a bad thing in any way and I still don't understand reasoning behind this exact rule. Please, reconsider.

Hi. I have a question about certain movie (https://www.themoviedb.org/movie/634429). I found an article in my language by a company, whose software, as I understand, was used for making the movie: https://www.blackmagicdesign.com/ua/media/release/20220727-01 . Does that count as an official translation?

@Allosaurus said:

Does that count as an official translation?

To count as a translation, the movie should be officially released in that language.

Wait, what..? I can't take this seriously anymore, I'm sorry.

@Allosaurus said:

Title is the most important criteria for identifying a movie. A lack of a translation is a bad thing in any way and I still don't understand reasoning behind this exact rule. Please, reconsider.

I totally agree with you. It doesn’t look like a “TMDB's strong international focus”.

Bumping this thread. There are a lot of titles that have official releases in their native language that has a given English title, they surely count as official translated titles do they? I mean, this is the case with Ohsama Sentai King-Ohger (https://www.themoviedb.org/tv/213439), the show was trademarked in both Japanese and English by its studio, Toei and all related merchandise of the show such as home video all feature that title. https://www.ldh.co.jp/eng/news/detail.php?lang=eng&site=LDH&newsid=0000045282

I do not know the reason, but.....It looks like they can do whatever they want.... And this is definitely not a good thing for the website....