Also, how should entry names be formatted regarding their capitalization when their local language has its own rules? For instance, French. I have come across several different sources which vary in explaining the rule—some say to only capitalize the first letter of a title/subtitle, others say that it's dependent on the presence of a definitive article, and even more have more convoluted explanations. For instance, this entry's name is formatted as Baten Kaitos: Les ailes éternelles et l'océan perdu.
Native French here, I feel compelled to answer. I don’t think there is a strict grammar rule here, as the game cited here examplifies you can go without capitalization in titles, but you can also go with, although usually not as much as english does: you only want to capitalize the most meaningful / important words (afaik you won’t get anything stricter than that), usually that means mostly nouns, adjectives and verbs (except maybe the auxilliary verbs
être and
avoir), but articles, conjuctions, etc. are usually excluded, except if the first word of the title.
Additionally, French spacing has its own rules too. I can't find any entry examples at the moment (though I have encountered them numerous times before), but I have seen many French entry names follow this format: Title : Subtitle, including the extra space preceding the colon ( : ). Here is a simple reference chart I found detailing which grammar symbols require the additional space and which don't alongside a page going through various symbols with example usage.
So, for the above two French rules, should we continue to adopt English formatting like with this entry that's formatted as Prince of Persia: Les Sables du Temps? Or adopt local rules?[/font]
This is a little more subtle than that. First the general rule regards all double typographical signs, namely
« » : ; ? !. All of those must be followed by a space and preceded by a non-breakable space (except for the opening french quotation mark
« where you swap the space and non-breakable space. But, this rule only applies strictly in France, and maybe in Belgium and Luxembourg for french only. As for other countries, I know that in Switzerland it is not uncommon to read french text written with german typography (and vice versa), I might be wrong but I think Quebec follows the same typography as Canadian english (which I assume is the same as US english?), and I have little idea for other french-speaking countries around the world.
So, whatever new rule that would differ from english, I have the feeling NA games with french in the title (assuming any exists) should still follow english typography (except if I am wrong and a québécois can correct me).
Note that it is usually acceptable to use spaces everywhere, given non-breakable spaces are the same length and usually hard to input anyway.
As for bilingual texts, typographical rules always loosen a bit, with the possibility to pick one language’s ruleset or the other depending of what seems best. But let’s take a few examples:
- https://vgcollect.com/item/93115: this one I would keep english rule, i.e. Prince of Persia: Les Sable du Temps; the reason being the colon follows directly a proposition in english, it makes more sense to me to not put a space there.
- https://vgcollect.com/item/118459: this one I would apply french rule, i.e. Baten Kaitos : Les ailes éternelles et l’océan perdu; the reason being Baten Kaitos is an old latinization of the modern Batn Qaytus, the arabic name for the Zeta Ceti constellation. Here Baten Kaitos is not more english than french, since it’s two arabic proper names written in latin characters, so I have the feeling the whole sentence can be read as french, with two proper names for the series title.
- https://vgcollect.com/item/178382: this one I would again apply french rule, i.e. Crash Bandicoot : La Vengeance de Cortex; the reason being Crash Bandicoot is the name of the main character, even in the french translation (and bandicoot, the animal, is written the exact same in english and french).
Hope that helped.
