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Japanese Titles


Official Titles
Any title that is used officially (e.g. on the title card, official poster or promotional materials) should be submitted exactly as written in the official source.

Unofficial Titles
Unofficial translations and transliterations should use the following style guide:

  • Wherever an English source text cannot be translated into Kanji or Hiragana; or wherever it seems more appropriate to use the English term for ease of understanding, please transliterate it phonetically into Katakana. As a rule-of-thumb, if you have to think very hard to translate an English word then use the English transliteration into Katakana instead. Be careful to create the correct pronunciation for phonetic equivalents.

  • Use half-width characters for spaces, Latin letters, Arabic numerals, and punctuation marks that exist in ASCII (or the "Basic Latin" Unicode block), i.e. ! " # $ % & ' ( ) * + , - . / : ; < = > ? @ [ \ ] ^ _ ` { | }; except the tilde, which should be converted to the wave dash 〜

  • ! ) , . : ; ? ] } should be suffixed by a space if followed by a non-punctuation letter (except when , or . is part of a number or when : is part of a clock time) e.g. ホット・ファズ -俺たちスーパーポリスメン!-. DOPE/ドープ!!, 100,000年後の安全, パリ 05:59

  • ( [ { should be prefixed by a space if preceded by a non-punctuation letter e.g. (500) 日のサマー, バードマン あるいは (無知がもたらす予期せぬ奇跡), ザ・コール [緊急通報指令室]

  • & should be enclosed by spaces.

  • < > should only be used as less-than and greater-than signs; if <> are used as some sorts of quotation marks, 〈〉 should be used instead e.g. ボルベール〈帰郷〉

  • ' " should follow the English conventions; that is, it should be prefixed by a space if at the beginning of a quote, and suffixed by a space if at the end of a quote e.g. IT/イット "それ" が見えたら、終わり。

  • Use full-width characters for katakana, kutōten, kagikakko, and interpunct, i.e. ア ... ン, 。 、 「 」 ・

  • Full-width punctuation marks need not be prefixed or suffixed by a space unless at the edge of a main/sub-title.

  • IMDb converts the ellipsis … to three periods ..., but a space need not be added before or after it unless present in the original e.g. カンバセーション...盗聴...

  • Single-character Roman numerals (Ⅰ, Ⅱ, Ⅲ, Ⅳ, Ⅴ, Ⅵ, Ⅶ, Ⅷ, Ⅸ, Ⅹ) should never be used; use ordinary Latin capitals instead.

  • If hyphens or straight dashes (-, ‐, or ―) are used to enclose a subtitle (that is, one hyphen or dash is inserted before the subtitle and another after it), format it as "Main Title -Subtitle-" (main title + space + half-width hyphen + subtitle + half-width hyphen)

  • If wave dashes (〜) are used to enclose a subtitle, whether or not to insert a space before the first wave dash should follow the original.

  • Do not include yomigana, even for jukujikun (unconventional reading); 猿の惑星: 創世記 is acceptable but 猿の惑星: 創世記 (ジェネシス) is not acceptable, because "創世記" and "ジェネシス" are not read separately, while ボルベール〈帰郷〉 is acceptable because "ボルベール" and "帰郷" are read separately; exceptions are where the first part consists entirely of non-Japanese characters e.g.  300 〈スリーハンドレッド〉 and ROMA/ローマ

  • Full-width should be used if it is part of a personal name, as it is interpreted as a double hyphen, not as an equals sign.

  • \ is a backslash; for the yen sign, which the backslash appears as on some devices, use ¥ (Unicode U+00A5)



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