Romanization of artist names

There doesn’t seem to be a thread about this, and I’ve no idea which existing thread to put this in, so…
 
Regarding artist name tags for non-English names (or those that don’t use the English alphabet, anyway), should an attempt be made to romanize them? For those unfamiliar with the term, it basically means spelling out the names using English characters.
 
Take the artist 蜜褲, for example (the art is NSFW, btw, so search with caution) – the romanization for that name would be “Mitsuko”, which is roughly translated as “honey pants” (more or less). So anyway, should an artist:mitsuko tag be added? The romanized version seems like it might be easier for folks to remember, and we could also keep the original kanji version of the name for accuracy’s sake along with the romanized one. Don’t know if that would make things more confusing or not, but anyway, what do you guys think?

Names should be romanized by default. There’s no reason or excuse to have them posted up in characters that the majority of the userbase can’t tell from random doodles.

Good topic.
 
I think romanization’s already the standard on the majority of tags, I only saw a small handful of cases where there were kanji.
 
My own issue is that I think romanization actually makes things MORE difficult. Since most of us can’t read kanji, we can not match up the artists (a Pixiv account, a tumblr or a personal website) with the romanized tags we have on the site, ‘cause we do not know how they are pronounced.
 
Is there a kanji to romanized translator somewhere or some other tool that’d help with that?

@Vree  

 
There are a few kanji to romanji (aka romanized Japanese) translators out there – a Google search should bring up some good ones. It helps to at least know a little bit of the language you’re trying to romanize, though, as machine translations sometimes leave something to be desired.
 
Anyway, I don’t think romanization would make things more difficult, especially if the original version of the name is also kept. That way, you get the best of both worlds: the original name in the native language, and a romanized version that’s easier for most people to remember.
 
Off topic: I only just realized that I didn’t receive any notifications to this thread. Apparently I wasn’t subscribed to it despite starting the thread. Weird. You’d think you’d be automatically subscribed to any forum threads you make.

http://nihongo.j-talk.com/ is what I use. I can’t say how reliable or accurate it is, though. I’d rather trust someone who can actually read it. Or use the handle on the artist’s other sites.
 
I’d much prefer it to be romanized because otherwise I can’t read it, or type it when I want to search for the artist’s work.

@dt  
That’s one of the better romanji translation sites out there, but yeah, having someone who knows the language is much better. I actually know some Japanese (written and spoken), so I could romanize names as I find them. The problem is that I do most of my browsing on my phone, and the booru’s not very mobile friendly. :(
 
I was also going to say that searching for non-romanized artist names would be a pain, until I realized that searching for the “pixiv” tag helps a bit. Not perfect, but eh, I’ll take what I can get.
 
Edit: Oh, and if anyone finds images without romanji or even the original artist names, you could maybe post it here and I could give it a shot. It helps if a pixiv/tumblr/whatever source link is already included, though.

@onepinksheep  

Yeah. Pixiv is weird. If you want to catch the 90% of not/japanese-tagged pixivs, try these searches: pixiv,artist needed and pixiv,-artist** First one catches anything tagged artist needed, second one only pics without an artist at all.
 
Alternatively, you could try using a humongous one such as  
pixiv,-artist:a**,-artist:b**,-artist:c**,...,-artist:z** (you’ll have to replace the … with all the alphabet thingies, and even then you might have to add a -artist:30clock or something like that as well) to get the ones tagged with only a japanese thing.
 
If you find anything, you’re probably best off posting them in the Tag Merge Propositions thread. Have a note on it if the tag doesn’t exist yet, since it’s usually for merging already-existing tags, but yeah, pixiv is a bit of a mess here. Example:  
artist:蜜褲 => artist:mitsuko (romanized pixiv name)

Well what’s the romanji for this artist for example?  
ﾂﾌﾞﾚﾅﾝｺｳﾊﾞｲ・ｳﾏｲ  
http://www.pixiv.net/member_illust.php?id=6260415&tag=MLP
 
 
@barbeque  
Well that’s exactly why we tag “pixiv”, but it’s not the most elegant solution still. (It only helps to narrow down artist hunts a bit, but you still have to go out and hunt the name down. If it’s say a nondescript AJ picture, it’s still a demanding task.)  
I wonder if we should just tag both alphabets for more complex names like what I saw on this one >>451984.

@Vree  
That’s “tsuburenankoubai umai”. I’m on my phone right now, so I can’t go searching their Pixiv page to see if they have an alternative name that may be easier to remember.

It’s actually Romaji, no n. Romanji with the n would be essentially unpronounceable in Japanese. And it’s not exactly a Romanization of Japanese words. Japanese has three phonetic alphabets (Hirigana for Japanese words, Katakana for writing out words borrowed from other languages, and Romaji, which is basically Katakana made out of combinations of Roman letters, to make written interchanges between Western and Japanese people easier) and one system of whole-word pictograms (Kanji) that’s word for word the same thing as Chinese in written form – except that the Japanese pronounce all the Kanji pictograms as the Japanese word. A Japanese person and a Chinese person could write to each other in Kanji and Mandarin (respectively) and be fully understood, but they couldn’t speak to each other face to face unless one of them had studied the other’s language.
 
Romaji looks like Roman lettering but is actually a phonetic Japanese alphabet in its own right. It follows Japanese phonetic conventions, not English phonemic conventions. Kitsune for example isn’t seven Roman letters long; it’s three Japanese Romaji letters long. Ki tsu ne. They’re not subdivisible into the apparent Roman letters.
 
The point of this whole explanation is that yes, Japanese at least should be translated into Romaji. That’s why the Japanese language has it. It’s not forcing English onto Japanese contributors. It’s just writing Japanese in a Japanese alphabet that’s available to everyone.

@Ferrotter  

 
Eh, that’s not completely true. While it’s true that kanji has its roots in Chinese, the language has diverged enough that the Japanese meanings of some characters can be significantly different from the original Chinese. Take the characters 勉強, for example. In Japanese, it could mean “study” (among others). In Chinese, however, it could mean “to push oneself”. The root concepts are similar, but the end meaning is different enough to trip the unwary.
 

 
Technically, that’s all romanization is: the conversion of writing from a different writing system (eg. Japanese, Hangul, etc.) to the Roman (Latin) script. In the case of Romaji, it’s romanization via phonetic transcription.
 
Anyway, that’s neither here nor there – it’s a to-ma-to/to-mah-to kind of thing. The general consensus seems to be that romanization is a good thing to have on the booru, which was the whole point of this thread. :)