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]

Hey folks!

In connection to the recent test for the way multilingual data is used - we are working to revert the translated titles!
The change should be reflected soon 🙂
Clear your cache if you continue to experience issues.
Thanks & cheers!

[swtanjewl]

Also there seem to be some half fixes with some of 關心妍 Jade Kwan’s songs coming up in Chinese characters and mandarin pinyin (for cantonese songs).

I believe some of these were exisiting issues and more in a song by song basis rather than the previous rollout. Is this something that will also be fixed?

[cdiony]

Seems like Spotify only fix those that were affected by the recent *internal test*. Those that were translated earlier on, can Spotify comment whether they will be fixed too?

One example is 動力火車，everything in English, even before the *internal test* issue. 

[adamgotacall]

Lol let's face it, the Spotify people aren't going to comment on any concrete timelines. Around a third of my non-English library is still translated (especially artist names).

They're just waiting for this thread to die out.

[swtanjewl]

Thankfully with artiste names they still pop up when you type in Chinese and I just match the English surname and their headshot.

Would be good to get some uniformity and have those back to native language too.

Hopefully Spotify will continue to hear us and not just let this thread die.

[hej23]

It is fixed on my side. Here, my NTU classmate Stephanie's album seems fixed.

[adamgotacall]

The artist name is still in English.

Spotify is only performing the rollback for changes that are part of the recent outrage. If the translation happened before that (for example Stephanie Sun's name has been translated a long time ago on Spotify) it would not be shown in the native language.

[ashie99]

Issue isn’t completely fixed for me - only selected songs seem to be reverted back to CN.

Another thing - non english artist names are always translated to english, even after typing their names in CN. To fix this, I tried to change my app language to simplified chinese, only to have all my song titles and certain artist names in traditional chinese instead. Seems like Spotify thinks these two are the same thing.

To be honest, this incident has left a sour note and given me a bad impression of Spotify. Hope Spotify can take better care when rolling out new “features” and properly research the needs and usage patterns of its multilingual user base. Let users decide if they want their artists and songs translated, or to view them in their original, native language.

Though the recent change was reverted, many non english songs and artists were already needlessly translated way back, in small batches. This is not a new thing, and it is only because a large number of songs were translated at once did people take notice and get angry.

Will see how Spotify handles this - would appreciate proper communication so we can see if we want to stick with this streaming service.

[adamgotacall]

Why is this issue getting marked as resolved? Too many non-English artist names are still getting translated into English.

[swtanjewl]

This was originally resolved for me but have noticed that some songs/artists have reverted back to English. Is this a bug in the update? Anyone else have the same issues?

[Zambiblasian1]

Just to update this topic, I am still experiencing this problem. So not really resolved, just had a sloppy band-aid applied which has now lost its effect.

[theduckside]

動力火車’s songs are all poorly translated to English for no reason.

[Sunnysideup1234567]

Not solved for all singers. Just head over to 动力火车 and you’ll see. 

[MegPegTeg]

This is still happening and is happening across more and more artists!

[xbabygirl81]

This is still happening for 動力火車 - can someone fix this please?