Good news for everyone in non-English-language, non-Latin-alphabet fandoms – our fandom tags will now include titles in the actual language, not just transliterations!
Tag Wrangling policy has always been to make our fandom tags in the form “Original Language Title | Translated English Title”. However, due to limitations in the Archive code for writing systems such as Chinese, Cyrillic, Hangul, and Japanese, we’ve used transliterated titles, rendering those languages into the Latin alphabet. This has caused problems because there are multiple transliteration systems in use. Since users have to guess which one we’re using, and because in many cases the transliterated titles are never used by anyone in the fandom, the tags aren’t reflective of real fannish practices.
The Archive now has improved features for wrangling fandom tags, however, so we’ve changed our guidelines for wrangling them. Starting immediately, we’ll be wrangling fandom tags in all languages as “Original Language Title | Translated English Title”, using the original language’s writing system. (For fandoms which do commonly use the transliterated titles, such as many anime and manga fandoms, the canonicals will be in the form “Original Language Title | Transliterated Title [| Translated English Title (if it exists)]”
This is an interim solution; we hope to someday get full support for tags in all languages. This guideline is a test case to see how well such tags work for users. For now we’re mostly going to stick to handling new fandoms this way, and only changing existing tags on a limited basis until we have a better idea of their usability, and as we have the resources to do so. (With several thousand non-English fandoms on the Archive, it’ll take the wranglers time to review all of them!) We also won’t be changing most character and relationship tags until we have better support for making those in non-Latin-alphabet languages.
So what does this mean for you?
1) You’ll be able to search for fandom titles in either the original language or the English translated title, and find the tags in the autocomplete under either title.
2) For fandoms which only use the original or translated titles, you’ll be able to browse alphabetically in the fandoms-by-media listings by the English translated title. (We don’t yet have proper support for listing tags in non-Latin-alphabet order). So the fandom ボクと魔王 | Okage: Shadow King will appear in Video Games under “O”, not “B”.
We hope this change will make the Archive more inclusive and welcoming to fans of all fandoms, in all languages. Please let us know what you think of this change, and thank you for your patience as we work to improve the Archive’s tags!
Mirrored from an original post on AO3 News. Find related news by viewing our tag cloud.