Chinese songs title suddenly translated to ENGLISH ??

[cdiony]

I listen to both English and Chinese songs and since last week I released that LOTS and LOTS of songs with chinese characters suddenly got replaced by English, either in PinYin or direct translation. Now most of the songs title are NOT RECOGNISABLE.

This happen and I believe could be due to following.

1) This is a translation algorithm within Spotify.

2) This is the metadata provided by the record company.

If it is (1), please fix it. If it is (2), don't Spotify have a policy to insist that metadata supplied by record owner MUST BE IN NATIVE LANGUAGE?

This is a deal breaker NOW after being a premium user for a long time and I really enjoy Spotify.

Attached a playlist of chinese songs curated by Spotify and the circled portions are example of  what happen since last week.

Plan

Premium

Country

Singapore

Device

(iPhone 13 Pro Max, Samsung Tab S8)

Operating System

(iOS 15.5, Android 11)

My Question or Issue

[lamhonn]

There's this 'Ideas' page where you can suggest features. I tried suggesting that users could have a setting whether they'd like to see titles translated (in English) or titles in their original language. Unfortunately, all I got 'Access denied'. Somebody try creating one and updating here. Apparently, the idea would need enough votes for the dev team to even consider it, so everyone stay active in case a suggestion is posted!

[slhx]

Over the past couple of days my Chinese songs have all started having their titles displayed in either English or pinyin. This completely screws up searching for your own songs AND searching for new songs - what are we supposed to do, guess the English translation of the song we're looking for?

I don't recognise half the songs in my playlist now. When I contacted Spotify support they told me they were "piloting a new feature" and suggested changing the language of the app, which is ridiculous because why should I have to change my entire interface language just to see Chinese songs with their proper titles?Whichever genius came up with this "feature" should be fired. At least give us the option of turning this "feature" off so that people who want to refer to songs in their original language can do that. 

This wasn't even an issue previously so I'm not sure why they decided to come up with a solution that no one needed. If this continues to be an issue I won't be on Spotify Premium much longer lol. 

Example of album with titles in translated English: https://open.spotify.com/album/1NvcqIHo7R3UD3B6F2mUIo?si=Onk3WLWKQeq3x-D1gMD58g

Example of album with pinyin titles: https://open.spotify.com/album/3JaRf6oM6IzAKdWhoPXls0?si=f3NUxXM7Tv2nPZNOJTYotw 

[Jojilemon]

Yes please change back. Even the Han yu pinyin is wrong. I'm having a hard time. The translation is like a white person speaking Chinese. It's bad. 

[hej23]

We should make a quiz out of the translated song titles.

What is the original title of Leslie Cheung's song here called "Girl's mind"?

[eerricw]

• For now, before Spotify reverts this stupidity, if you are a user bothered by this change, you can go to app Settings and change your Spotify interface language to Chinese. However, if you are an Android user, there appears not to be some place you can change this in your app; you must change your default system language to Chinese. But this method, inconvenient as it is for many, does not solve the problem entirely, as only song titles in search/artist/album pages will be in Chinese, and songs in your playlist will remain English/pinyin.

• Thank you, Spotify, but we do not need song titles translated to English or turned to pinyin. Most people enjoying Chinese songs (and using an English interface) are multilingual. Otherwise, how are we making sense of the lyrics of the songs? Such a change at best only makes sense to a limited number of listeners.

• As a speaker of both Mandarin and Cantonese, the change gives me a feeling that the Chinese languages have been marginalized or deprecated. Spotify really should not assume all their users are monolingual English speakers or have Western (for lack of a better word) cultural backgrounds, even if their account is in an English-speaking country or their user interface is in English.

• English translated song titles could be convenient for some users without Chinese background, but English translations very often fail to capture the meaning of the original song title, and for Chinese speakers they simply rendered all the songs unrecognisable. For example, Dear Jane's "哪裡只得我共你" has been changed to "You and Me" and Miriam Yeung's "抬起我的頭來" is now "Raise Your Chin". Messages are lost or distorted; such translations are not apparent for Chinese speakers; and sometimes it is hard even to find out the correspondent Chinese title.

• Romanization of all Chinese song titles is NOT technically feasible, if you still want everything neat and clean:

  1. Now some Cantonese song titles are turned into pinyin, which is designed only for Mandarin (because Cantonese pronounces the characters completely differently and has different systems of Romanization). The problem is, it is in general hard to distinguish whether a Chinese-titled song is in Cantonese or Mandarin (or any other Chinese language/dialect!) unless you have a hand-picked database for this, partly because some artists or even albums have songs in both languages. In rare cases, a song can be a mix of the two languages, e.g. "好心分手" by Candy Lo and Leehom Wang.

  2. Even when a song is in Mandarin, it is still not appropriate to use pinyin for its title. Many Mandarin speakers do not know how to use pinyin, as pinyin is only one of the Romanization systems for Mandarin. While pinyin is currently commonly used in China Mainland (only in recent decades. Aged people in China Mainland do not know pinyin either), this is not the case in Taiwan and many other Chinese-speaking communities. Only Chinese characters are what every Chinese speaker knows.

  3. Because of the existence of different Romanization systems for Chinese, it is extremely hard to keep everything consistent. In fact, there are already some song titles Romanized not using pinyin. For example, Jay Chou's "晴天" is now "Chin Tien" (which should be "Qing Tian" in pinyin), but we can also see songs from the same album turned to pinyin.

• From what we discussed above, a possible solution would only be:

  1. Stop trying to Romanize Chinese song titles, either use pinyin or other systems. Leave the characters as-is.

  2. If a commonly accepted English translation for the song title is available, ONLY adopt the translation when the user turns on some option in their profile settings. Additionally, this would be nice if such an option can be applied to the names of artists. Chinese-speaking users already suffer from confusion seeing their favourite singers' name in English, though it is usually easy to find out the correspondence.

• Please consider the solutions above, or simply revert this change as soon as possible.

[Nizu水]

I’ll leave a link to an Idea that has been closed in the past because of insufficient votes. Maybe Spotify will hear us out if that idea thread got enough votes. https://community.spotify.com/t5/Closed-Ideas/Be-able-to-disable-translation-localization-of-song-ti... 

[ES8964]

I hate you Spotify!!

[Samsean]

Thanks for the post!! I listen to both Chinese and English music as well. Even if I change the app language from English to Chinese, many Chinese songs are still in English. What’s more, some albums and songs in English were translated into Chinese.

This is ridiculous and completely unacceptable! Hope Spotify fix this asap. Album and song titles should be displayed in their original language!

 

[Simplex123]

Please fix this and change it back. It's extremely hard to find songs

[VladimirKutuzov]

Japanese song titles in traditional Chinese version has the same problem 

Most, more and more Japanese song titles turned into romanization from hiragana, katakana and kanji, makes it very hard to read 

You should respect all song titles, they all have their own meanings which the artists want to convey to audiences, you guys are doing something very rude.

And I didn't notice that, they even translate some titles of them, now I can't even know what's their original meanings

[pancakelistener]

Spotify please revert the recent change. I've no idea what song I'm listening to. I'm considering switching to competitors.

[BentoSpot]

Same here

[JohnsonC]

spotify pls revert holy **bleep**

[lebruo1621]

Can Spotify fix this issue ASAP as I believe that it is very annoying to most people. Certain Mandarin songs were renamed Pinyin. It's inconvenient for me to search for songs because out of a sudden all the song is renamed to the Romanian alphabet.

PS: a Pinyin could be pronounced in 10 different words in Mandarin and it takes time to guess the original song name. 

 

[Showithglasses]

Same thing with j pop not happy 😕

[slimowen]

The new update makes absolutely no sense and the whole app now is for me unusable.  At end of the day how would someone on earth think this is a good idea??? FIX THIS **** SPOTIFY OR APPLE MUSIC

[RandomKing1]

Same with mine! I had this happening first on my iPhone X, but then it also happened on my laptop PC and my Tesla Model Y! Not even a native Chinese speaker can recognize the song titles without careful reading. Not only that, some artist names are in pinyin too when they weren’t before.

[Softriceking]

Pleas fix this bug or else I’m going back to Apple Music. 

[Softriceking]

A lot of my Chinese songs name changed to English. Please fix this bug, We don’t want to go back to Apple Music. 

[ClassicalListener]

**bleep**!!!, i replied to this topic already, but got so angry and frustrated when I listen to a song on my play list I am posting again. @RandomKing1, it was one of your songs (Gao Bai Qi Qiu) on the posted picture that triggered me. wth is the title, I don't know and I can't remember because they made it impossible to guess the title. By next month, I will switch to a different streaming platform if it isn't fixed. So angry and disappointed! For a beta feature that no one asked for, and couldn't opt out of. In case you are interested, if you search for a song using the original language title, the songs (with the stupid translated titles) do show up (with the translated titles). It just makes me angry, as others have said, that is so much disrespect to the original artist's intention and meaning for the song title as well as the language.