Edit: This post was based on a false assumption and changes made primarily on MangaDex and not MangaUpdates.

Sorry, if I missed an existing post on this, but I didn't see a thread for it.

Recently, some mass editing of Manhua titles seems to have occurred. Tons of them went from using their English title to instead use some Romanized version of the foreign name. Many of these titles have the proper diacritics even stripped from them, and some of these modified series even have official English names that were overridden.

Was there a reason for this? Is this a new policy change to prefer non-English titles but reject non-Latin alphabets or something? I would just assume it was one rogue editor except there are dozens of series changed like this.

Some examples:

• https://www.mangaupdates.com/series/cgb4lbd/hei-yueguang-nv-zhu-zong-xiang-biaoji-wo
• https://www.mangaupdates.com/series/igi0jbr/shen-wei-e-yi-nv-pei-de-wo-yang-cheng-bing-jiao-nv-zhu-hen-zheng-chang-ba
• https://www.mangaupdates.com/series/5lre12z/cong-chengwei-ni-de-gonglve-duixiang-kaishi

Personally, I dislike this change, since I think it reduces usability of the site significantly in some areas (most notably "Category Recommendations" becomes hard to parse). I also first noticed this change because it propagated downstream to other sites using MangaUpdates data, so it may have negative effects on other sites too.

Agreed, I find it a lot harder to find or tell apart titles when their main listing is under some romanized version of the original title instead of a suitable translation.

If I knew Chinese I'd just be reading the raws instead of on English language websites, and if that were the case I'd know it by the actual original title, not the romanized version, so I'm not even sure exactly who the romanized titles are for.

Yeah, the only explanation I can think of is if there was a reason to try to fit everything into ASCII encoding (in order to save bytes over UTF-8), this might make some sense. Stripping the diacritical marks from the Romanized titles doesn't make sense for any other scenario (because doing that makes the title objectively less useful).

So that's why I asked if it was a policy change - maybe the site was optimizing character storage in critical tables or something.

As you mentioned, foreign language readers benefit most from the real title, and English readers benefit most from the English translations, while mangled Romanized titles (due to the lack of diacritics) benefit almost nobody except -maybe- the people paying the site's bills assuming that the storage reduction somehow translates to wildly improved query performance (which may not be a safe assumption).

I wish there would be setting like on anidb, I would choose to show English official title as main title everywhere because I know only few Japanese words and even less Chinese and Korean... One? And it's name, not even common word. For example I would love order: official English > first available English on alt list > romanized version > romanized version with all diacritics (I'm not denying them, just feels weird for Chinese where is sooo many of them) > other. If I change my mind I can always choose romanization > official English > first alt english

not-english-native

Quote from Simca0 Some examples:

• https://www.mangaupdates.com/series/cgb4lbd/hei-yueguang-nv-zhu-zong-xiang-biaoji-wo
• https://www.mangaupdates.com/series/igi0jbr/shen-wei-e-yi-nv-pei-de-wo-yang-cheng-bing-jiao-nv-zhu-hen-zheng-chang-ba
• https://www.mangaupdates.com/series/5lre12z/cong-chengwei-ni-de-gonglve-duixiang-kaishi

Nothing has changed. For all your examples, the logs show that these series have had titles like this since they were originally added. No one has bothered to submit a Change Request to change the name to something else

A just ruler amongst tyrants

Hmm... perhaps I'm just crazy but I was sure at least one of those was English at one point (the first one). If it's just a matter of people not submitting changes for Manhua since it is less popular, I'll run through and correct a bunch of the ones that either official or generally agreed upon.

Edit: Sent in a bunch of change requests, covering most of what I saw in Chinese Yuri plus fixing a handful of JP ones that have had official English translations for a long time.

We do not switch Japanese series to use official English titles. We only do that for Chinese and Korean series

A just ruler amongst tyrants

Gotcha, that makes sense. I actually saw one that needs switched the other way then; I'll submit a request for that.

I figured out my initial confusion with this topic, by the way:

1. MangaDex is changing how they handle titles. They're replacing everything with Romanized versions in preparation of a future update where they'll let users pick which title type to prefer.
2. MangaDex v3 used MangaUpdates data initially for titles but v5 does not. The titles I happened to check on MangaDex when the changes happened had the same titles on here so I assumed there was a relationship, but it was just a coincidence.