Talk:List of games with expansion audio

Romanization

I understand that someone who speaks French or Greek as a first language might see ou and think [u], but in Japanese transliteration it's [o:]. The Japanese sound オウ can be transliterated ou, ô (with circumflex), or ō (with macron), depending on a particular publication's house style. I imagine that this list may have been pulled from NesCartDB, which uses the ou convention. Sometimes this is dictated by character set: ou for ASCII or ô for Latin-1. Or occasionally, a particular transliteration becomes customary for a particular name. For example, a publisher or the fan community may have consistently used one transliteration in Western media. For example, the Japanese version of Animal Crossing series (どうぶつの森) is most often spelled Doubutsu no Mori. In a few cases, homophones end up developing distinct customary transliterations, such as Toho (東宝, the Godzilla company) vs. Touhou (東方, the shmup series). Do we need to hammer out a manual of style page for transliterating titles of Famicom games? --Tepples (talk) 07:26, 26 January 2014 (MST)

I don't see the point of the change. There is nothing invalid in the use of "ou", as it is a very standard romanization and was consistent across the entire list. I made this list based on the filenames used in my NSF collection, and every NSF archive I can find online appears to use the "ou" convention (e.g. the collections of Gil Galad, joshw, Zophar's Domain, akuma, and kingshriek). Changing them all to "ō" makes them inconsistent with these collections, which I think is a disadvantage here. Naively searching these games with "ō" is less likely to yield the desired result. Someone familiar with Japanese might think to try again with "ou", so it would be merely an inconvenience for such a person, but someone unfamiliar with it might have a harder time finding what they're looking for. There's nothing to gain by this convention change, in my opinion. - Rainwarrior (talk) 21:23, 26 January 2014 (MST)

To put another way, the reason to use the "ou" convention is it creates a more direct mapping from the Roman characters to Japanese, and also avoids the use of extended characters. The reason to use the "ō" convention is to help understand the pronunciation, as "ou" will be pronounced wrong by a naive English speaking reader. I don't think there is any good reason to favour pronunciation for the purposes of the NesDev wiki, and there is indeed an advantage to having a more direct transliteration of the titles given by the "ou" convention. - Rainwarrior (talk) 21:28, 26 January 2014 (MST)

Well is the capital of Japan known as Tōkyō or Toukyou ? That's the question. If you guys don't like the ō because of unicode characters I understand very much, then a plain 'o' (as in Tokyo) is probably the closest you can go. "ou" is just a mapping from kana to romanji, which leads to wrong pronunciation (and probably not only for French or Greek speakers). Now as long as the game did have their titles in kanjis, it's technically wrong to have them a name with roman letters. Now I think everyone will agree that it's much more convenient to use roman letters in an international context, so the quesiton is, do you want to have correct pronunciation, or a mapping to kana ? Since nobody cares about kana, I'd think that rationally, the correct pronunciation is the way to go. Although I perfectly understand the point about matching it to the NSF collection names or Bootgod's database, both of which used "ou" for no particular reason. So in short, if you want to refert, fine go ahead I won't mind. But I still think that "Akumajou" sounds extremely weird.Bregalad (talk) 09:50, 28 January 2014 (MST)

That city has a common English name, "Tokyo", so it is not appropriate to romanize it. Similarly we should not normally write "Firenze" or "Wien" in an English context. I think the highest priority for NESDev purposes is being able to use these names to search and find ROMs or other relevant information, and using the same convention as every ROM/NSF database is key toward fulfilling this goal. Avoiding extended characters for ease of typing is a secondary benefit toward this goal. (The character ō is not easily available on any common keyboard. Even less so if your keyboard is missing a numpad.) I would agree that attempting to reconstruct kana from the romanization is not important, though I would point out that the Microsoft IME for Japanese text displays potential kanji as you type the ou style romanization. I also thing pronunciation is unimportant for NESDev. If you are a person who does not know any Japanese and doesn't even know what Akumajou means, it doesn't matter that you might pronounce it wrong from this reading. If you already are familiar with Japanese neither romanization presents a challenge to correct pronunciation. Let pronunciation be taught elsewhere, we have other goals here. - Rainwarrior (talk) 11:09, 28 January 2014 (MST)