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Why are there no letters with accents in the names? |
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A German speaking user pointed out that the name of the song we had as "Kunss' die Hand schine Frau" should correctly be "Küss die Hand schöne Frau". This is of course exactly right, however the system we use deliberately disallows the use of characters with accents.
One reason for this is that the handling of such data presents some challenges. We get charts from web pages, via spreadsheets and from text files. All three of these have different ways of handling non-ASCII characters and keeping track of the various code sets can be tricky and prone to error.
However that is not the main reason for our willful adoption of the lowest common denominator in character sets. That has to do with the fact that we get data from so many sources. Each of our sources has made its own decision about translating their names. As an example the group Blue Oyster Cult are more correctly listed as as "The Blue Öyster Cult", we obviously have to ensure that the names are consistent. The easiest way to do that is to force all characters to be ASCII.
Of course it also helps that the most widely successful entries are in English (or the be more accurate in American). In the current (1.9.060) top 100 song titles there is only one that has any non-English text Lady Marmalade (Voulez-Vous Coucher Aver Moi Ce Soir?).
Previous Comments (newest first)
30 Oct 2015
adoption
a song from the 1980 about a girl wanting to give up her child for adoptionbut change her mind when her boyfriend walks in the door to the hospital room.
14 Jul 2010
Spelling of title # 98
The correct spelling is "Küss die Hand schöne Frau" If you don't have an "Ü" or an "Ö" you can write alternatively "Kuess die Hand schoene Frau"
Greetings
Al
We have made the fix you suggested, thanks for the correction.
As you hinted we unfortunately can't have characters with accents in the names of artists, songs or albums. Not only is it a challenge to correctly handle accented characters but, more importantly, our sources all take different approaches to them (depending, we suspect, on the native languages of the implementers and the tools they use), so when we consolidate entries we have to take a well defined position. We've decided that the best way to be consistent is to avoid all non-ASCII characters.
We realise that this is a bad approach, however it is at least consistent.
If you find any other places where our woeful ignorance of German (or any other language) has resulted in some bad names we would be glad to receive any suggested fixes.