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

[cdiony]

Spotify, if you are to reverse this multilingual test as promised, do also change the names of the artists to their native languages, they deserve it. As an example (attached image), would expect the change to reflect as follow.

BEST SOLUTION 

男人女人

許茹芸

ALTERNATIVE 

男人女人 (Men and Women)

許茹芸 (Valen Hsu)

As mentioned by many users, it is also acceptable to provide a switch for users to switch.

[cycyrus]

Same problem here

[Steph962]

Same here. The translated title make it impossible to search for Chinese songs. I can't believe a company like Spotify would make such stupid "enhancements".

Revert this change or I'm ready to switch to another provider. 

[url_cinnamon]

i'm glad spotify has finally responded now, and i really hope they can revert the "feature" on the timeline they've promised... basically in a few hours hopefully

[CielMC]

How is this change still not reversed? Just revert it first, add an option to disable it, then push it back out.

[someone_2]

It’s fixed for me now.

[BentoSpot]

The song shows up in native language in the album view, but when you play the song, it still show pingyin.

[cdiony]

Half baked FIX. When you play the song it will still show ENGLISH / PINYIN 

2 images show not all are translated back.

Will see if next 2 days will be better.

[MentalityCMS65]

Would it be possible for this to be made into a toggle-able setting? I personally LOVED having the translations, as it made it easier to identify and enjoy songs.

[cdiony · Accepted solution]

Thanks Spotify for the reversal. I checked some of my playlists and they are now back to Chinese characters. 

If you still did not see the change, delete and reinstall the app, it works for me. 

[candywww]

I unsubscribed and wrote the exact same thing as the reason.    I will not come back if Spotify don't resume the song names like before, which is the only reason why even Spotify has no hi-fi sound quality yet I am still stuck with it.  And Spotify is just killing themselves by eliminating the only one reason for me to use Spotify.   I can always pick some other alternative apps

[FatPenguin2]

As this thread will slowly become inactive as the changes are now being reverted, before we all go back into the shadows,  I would like say thank you to everyone in the Asian Community for banding together to take Spotify in a better direction! 

"Wo Men Yi Chi Ji Xu Add Oil"  (Translation joke pun intended :P)

[tingyu67]

After nearly a week of headache, things are finally slowly getting fixed on my Spotify app. Thank you @cdiony for making this post and for everyone who engaged with it. 

Ideally the translation feature should be toggle-able for those who do or do not want to see translations in their app. Hope Spotify developers can learn a thing or two from this. Don't force these features upon your users that haven't even been tested thoroughly, and respect the artists who have the song title in their native language.

[1279020506]

I appreciate the rapid response for this particular issue. I was wondering if Spotify had planned to revert the name of the artist to their native language too? I understand this artist name translation was quite some time ago but please? Give us back their proper name too? We all just guessed the artist by the songs we are familiar with. Well at least I was.

We want them artist names back too. 

[arthroplasty]

I’m glad someone said this. It’s been an annoyance for me, but it’s not NEARLY as bad as the song names being retro-changed to English…Thank god they reverted it. But anyways yeah I’d prefer the artists name in it’s original cyrillic instead of the latin phonetic equivalent. 

To the dev team lead(?) that decided this was a good idea to push up, you are completely lunatic and lost your mind if you thought this was a good idea to begin with. Not only did you make your end users angry, you also wasted devs’ time writing this utter garbage. Congrats, I can’t think of a worse decision!

[adamgotacall]

Please fix translated artist names as well. Artist name translations do not work well with lastfm scrobbles.

[ongxiang]

The reason I use Spotify is because it display song titles in its original language. If they don't revert back the changes I might as well go back to Apple Music.

[kryptonika]

Good to see that Spotify listened to its userbase and walked this back.

A honest suggestion - Spotify seriously needs to put a lot more thought and consideration on how changes like these impact their customer base. This particular change might have had good intent, however it was brutally obvious that there was zero cultural considerations and attention paid to multilingual users like us. Give uers options.

Also - a handful of users on this thread here were told by customer support that this change was part of a pilot/test program. If this was indeed a test, why was this change rolled straight out to the live environment, and not to a test/beta branch?

So many questions...

[Crisyeung]

Thank you thank you thank you (canceling apple music)!! Thanks for listening!! Imagine English being translated to Japanese characters, that's how crazy it was! 

[swtanjewl]

This seems o be mostly resolved but there are whole artists and albums still being translated for example 飛輪海‘s (Fahrenheit) songs and album names.

Similarly, still having issues with Tank 呂建中 and Jeno Liu 劉力揚.