Korean names update

[Oliver Sodemann]

Hi there,

I am rarely in the forum here,
as I am just doing my most beloved work which
is the uploading of rare stills and original materials.

While tagging I was just irritated last week:
Putting in "Hwang Jang-Lee" (which I had to get
used to, but finally managed), I several times thought
I had put in the wrong name, as "Hwang Jeong-Ri"
popped up, thinking I made a mistake.

Was it just recently, that names have changed
and somebody exchanged this main entry?

"Hwang Jang-Lee" is rather common, also,
"Wong Cheng-Li" or "Huang Cheng-Li". But not
"Hwang Jeong-Ri".

There is and was much discussion here about names
already years ago, many names are still not consistent and
still a mixture between Mandarin and Cantonese. I do not
complain about that, as this would be too much work
to correct all this. And this is not why I am here for.

But, I plead for the most familiar names on posters
and lobbies of the time.

Hwang Jang-Lee was very active in the Hong Kong cinema,
and rather unknown back then for his early Korean movies
(outside Korea, maybe not even there before he became
a Hong Kong star).

And I plead to not let the "hkmdb" shift into a "kmdb"
(Korean movie data base) over the time. This is not where
we started and not what our definition here was and is:
Hongkong movies.

Of course, crossover movies were made, but sheer Korean
productions as entries ... or sheer mainland movies that
not have Hong Kong actors in them, at least one ... made
me more and more wonder over the time. (Whereas other
international productions – I don't know whether I am up to
date here – are not allowed, like MAN WITH THE GOLDEN GUN,
starring Chen Yao Lin, in whose filmo this movie should
be enlisted. Instead this is only given in some comment)

My approach here is to get the most complete filmographies,
and not to miss crossover productions. If I am interested in
an actor or actress, I would like to see all of his movies
in a row – not just the Hong Kong ones.

I would (re)appreciate the most common names
as main entries, and not so many, many aliases given as "aliases"
(which they are NOT by definition, because the stars are NOT "also KNOWN as"
these spellings sometimes only differing by just one letter, they are rather
"UNKNOWN as" with what can be found here very often in our database.)

I really regret that this expansion to not Hong Kong
productions has progressed so far and that this
process has become nearly irreversable.

"Casanova Wong/Ca Sa Fa" now as "Wang Ho" ...

https://hkmdb.com/db/people/view.mhtml? ... ay_set=eng

... sorry, this gets really weird to me.

Best,
Oliver

[J.J.Hayden]

Sorry if you had issues, but the original transliterations have been moved to aliases so there should be no problems when entering Hwang Jang-lee, it should still link to the correct page.

The names of Korean actors have been corrected to a direct translation of their current stage name in Hangul, i.e. Hwang Jeong-ri rather than a Cantonese or Mandarin transliteration such as Hwang Jang-lee or Huang Cheng-li etc. This correction provides consistency for Koreans as there is only Hangul, rather than the mess of switching back and forth between Cantonese and Mandarin languages and then all the possible transliterations fighting for supremacy, which is where the real confusion comes in. Same goes for English names like Casanova Wong, which is made from the Cantonese transliteration of the Hangul, Wang. We already do the same for various other language names e.g. Sawada Kenya rather than Zetian Qianye or Mark Houghton rather than Mai He-dun etc. Some of these changes may seem a bit odd at first, but they're not drastically different and usually won't take much time to pick up.

Cheers

[bkasten]

This has gotten a bit messy. I offer these observations and invite further discussion.

Just a reminder that existing data that gets changed should be mentioned here in the forum as much as practicable.

The HKMDB is a Chinese and English database, but we have to also include people from other cultures and languages that participated in HK cinema. As such, things become a bit muddy with the edge cases. However, per the Editor's Guidelines everyone needs to have a Big5 name and a Romanized name, and those "should" come solely from film credits and promotional materials, and should generally not be transliterations. The point of the database is to use films as primary sources for information. And the Big5 name and the main romanization is the one most commonly used in films, with the others being credited-as Aliases. I specifically point out in the Editor's Guidelines that translations and transliterations are not allowed as Aliases. For people, I have included an automatically generated romanized Mandarin name in Pinyin on the UTF-8 people page and I will also eventually include a Cantonese romanization as well (just as I once had in the past).

All that said, we get to the case of handling Korean, Japanese, Thai, Vietnamese (and everyone else). We really need to have a similar method of including a standardized romanization for those non-Chinese people. In the case of Korean, I have asked J.J. to use his Korean romanization methodology on applicable (i.e., Korean) People. The question is how do we include it without violating our principle of using the most-credited-as main Chinese Name and Romanized name. I invite suggestions, but I think that perhaps for now the Korean romanizations are OK as J.J. has them until I add a feature to better handle and display these other orthographies and romanizations as I have with Chinese.

There is a lot of grey area in this matter, and nothing is carved in stone. I will try to provide a solution as soon as possible.

[Michael Kistner]

In my opinion nobody (or almost nobody) would recognize Hwang Jang-Lee if he sees the name "Hwang Jeong-Ri" in a cast list.

An martial arts movie expert who had meet Hwang Jang-Lee personally in the past wrote that:

"The problem is that they are being influenced by the Korean Movie database where Hwang is called Hwang Jeong-ri.
However I can confirm that this is not the official name of Hwang it is a name made up by KMDB when they put the Korean characters of HJL in google translate yo get Hwang Jeong-ri (You see how A.i is taking over everything ) , the official Korean romanized spelling is Hwang Jung Lee. He uses that name himself.

Wang Ho , should be Wong Fu or Wang Fu 王虎 as this was Casanova's name pre Ka Sa Fa, this name was given by Golden Harvest."

[J.J.Hayden]

I hear your opinion but I would disagree, IMO it's the other way around and most people would be able to recognise his name as they're either already aware of Korean names or simply see how the names are pretty similar and make the connection. But it's not about my opinion, just trying to be accurate and provide useful data.


I'm not sure who this movie expert is but they're evidently not an expert on Korean language.

Firstly, the corrections to the main name are in no way being influenced by the the KMDB. The fact that the KMDB also wrote it this way does help you understand why it's accurate, but it's not being used in this matter.


Secondly they can't confirm that: Hwang Jeong-ri is not the official name; that it's "made up" by the KMDB just by putting the Korean characters into Google; that the "official name" is Hwang Jung Lee, this simply isn't true. It's not made up, or put into Google, it's a direct way of translating the Hangul 황정리, this is the official name, but despite what this movie expert says there is no "official" way of translating the Hanja to English, so there really is no "official English name". Google (and some other transliterations) will often abbreviate the vowels which causes confusion where trying to distinguish e.g. Jeong; Jong; Joong etc. You can see this yourself when it comes to which name Hwang Jeong-ri himself uses as even when he is writing his own name in English it doesn't remain consistent. There is no "official transliteration", the one I am using makes it more accurate to the "Official" Hangul and Hanja i.e. 황 Hwang; 정 Jeong (not abbreviated Jung); and 리 Ri (as opposed to 이 Lee). I hope this makes the method of correction more clear.


As for the name Wang Ho, again simply take the Hangul 왕호 Wang Ho ( 王虎 in Hanja). It is possible he was given this name by Golden Harvest, but stories conflict about where the name first came from, he was credited as Wang Ho in Korean films before his Hong Kong films but this isn't definitive either way. What is definitive is that the stage name Wang Ho 왕호 is what he has used throughout his career and uses to this day.


As stated earlier, the correction is to bring consistency to the Korean names on the HKMDB, rather than the back and forth between "which Chinese name is more popular" and which of the Korean transliterations to use as there's no official one. It's simply taking the most up to date stage name of the person and using the set Hangul transliteration. Simple, consistent and no data is lost as the other variations are still there as aliases.

Cheers

[bkasten]

Everyone please read and review this carefully so we have no misunderstandings.

For now, until I change how non-Chinese official romanized names are displayed, what exists in the "English" field for Korean romanization (in this case, Hwang Jeong-Ri) is OK.

However, it may need to change as what J.J. states does not fully follow spirit of the editor guidelines that state that the romanized name (i.,e., English) is to be the most commonly credited-as name - whatever it is - Chinese, Swahili, Martian, or otherwise.

Sometimes there is no romanized name and we have to guess. And sometimes there are so many we need to make a judgement call as to which to use. Hwang Jang-Lee is a good case in point as we have more than 20 aliases for him.

I will add a new field which will allow for customized official and semi-official transliterated and romanized names similar to the way I have it here for example in the UTF Chinese/English page:
https://hkmdb.com/db/people/view_utf.mh ... ay_set=eng

Where Ng Kwun-Yu's (Sandra Ng) romanized name using pinyin orthography is:
wú jūn rú

I will add a whole new field which will allow for manually adding, for example in the case of Korean, Hanja, Hangul and an official and semi-official romanization.

Ultimately, here is the issue: I feel there is a usability problem here as when we look at a film's credits in English we likely want to see what is most recognizable. Should we reconsider this approach? If so, then we can discuss that.

Lastly, I believe one of the database's most significant shortcomings is that I have not created the ability to have "credited-as" in the credits. Perhaps this would cure every problem is this nature?

[J.J.Hayden]

I think an issue with the "most communally credited" is how is this decided, do we go through each print and count or have a vote or something, how do we decide for example if it's Liu Chia-liang or Lau Kar-leung, and what is the case when there's Mandarin and Cantonese credits on different prints? I'm not sure how these things decided.

I think that going by nationality would be decent system, e.g. Cantonese for Hong Kongers, un-hyphenated Mandarin for Mainlanders, hyphenated Mandarin for Taiwanese etc. but that runs into it's own problems when we don't know the nationality etc. Then I guess it becomes an educated guess by seeing where they mainly worked, say if they've got 10 film credits and 7 were in Taiwan, it'd be safe to have the hyphenated Mandarin name, and so on. I feel this might be a good way to avoid the back and forth, one of the main reasons for implementing the Korean name corrections (aside from accuracy and consistency) is to avoid the mess of all the back and forth. - that's my thoughts on that issue.

As for the "credited as" I think is a good idea, as it makes it a lot easier to match up the film print's cast list with unofficial cast lists (such as the ones we've created here on HKMDB). It also clears up the problem of misprinted or mistranslated names (I can recall a film where the Hanja 金 was mixed up on a film print as 全), just to name a few positives that come to mind. But if it was changed to this manner, what becomes of the cast who's credits don't appear on the film (usually most of them ), would they have an [uncredited] label or left blank? As I often say, I'm not a tech guy, so I've no idea what it'd take to implement this system or if it would be feasible, but that's my thoughts on it anyway.

EDIT - sorry I left this bit out: When you say about "credited as" would this be a label next to the name like on the IMDB or would the name itself be written as it is on the page but the hyperlink leads to the person's main page similar to the KMDB?

There's a lot of things to weigh up and consider here, I don't envy your position Bob.

[bkasten]

I have discussed this at length previously (to the lament of some editors I am sure...).

Unfortunately, from a language perspective it's not that easy. A hyphenated romanization implies the use of the Wade-Giles or Yale romanization (of Mandarin). Wage-Giles was used as the primary Mandarin romanization before the widespread adoption of the pinyin orthography in the late 1950s. And Taiwan used Wade-Giles up until relatively recently, when they also standardized romanization on pinyin (which unlike Wade-Giles and Yale, is a true and complete orthography). So in the case of older people, they would frequently romanize their Mandarin name with Wade-Giles. Unfortunately Wade-Giles has variations in spellings and the use of diacritical marks (like hypens), hence the often numerous spellings and misspellings of people in older films. So the question is where is the age and date cutoff for the use of these romanizations. Again, we simply have to rely on how people are credited in films...

To make matters even more uncertain, in some cases, we have people from the mainland having their names romanized into Cantonese (and vice versa). So in the Cantonese case, we have Yale romanization used for older people, and in more modern times Jyutping romanization is more common.

All of this has led me to conclude that the best way to deal with all of this is to add a feature to the database that allows the use of Aliases in credits so as to show "credited as". Thus an editor would add a cast member, and once added would have the option to use one of the person's Aliases to indicate "credited as". I can then show this credited-as name/alias on the main movie credit page (and could optionally show their primary name [or not]).

I will get started on this and will need some people to test it out. Hopefully this cures a longstanding problem and we can continue to decide how to use the primary English field (or perhaps discard it altogether).

[J.J.Hayden]

Sounds interesting Bob, good luck with it. If I can be of any assistance, feel free to give me a buzz.

Cheers

[Michael Kistner]

I don't want to upset anyone (J.J. Hayden did many good actor IDs and other stuff), but it might be interesting to see what an insider has to say on the subject of the name changes. This case is about the Korean actor most of the people outside Korea know as Eagle Han Ying 韓鷹 - now called Kim Yeong-Il 金榮一. That wrote actor, movie maker, movie distributor Toby Russell after he hadn't found at first the name 韓鷹 in the hkmdb cast list of movies with Eagle Han Ying and I told him his name was changed:


<<<This is very unwise as he has never been credited as such in any Chinese version of his Hong Kong produced or co produced films of which there are many, this is the Hong Kong Movie data base after all not Korean Movie Data Base.

There are a number of important distributors in Hong Kong, China and Taiwan , some were asking "Why is Han Ying not listed in his own films",

You might want to pass that info on to the hkmdb heads.

it's not only Gwailos using this fine and wonderful site but 1000's of Asian people and members of the HK film industry too.<<<<


At first at the chinese display of Eagle Han/Kim Yeong-Il the alias 韓鷹 was not listed - I added it after Toby Russell's complaint. That was also one reason for his words.