How to list foreign voice actors on character pages

Morgan, you should really name the person you are talking to, otherwise people could (wrongly) believe that I said both quotes instead of only the first one.

Yes, I do, however, just by checking a little, it does become abvious that this american-based site does treat the american viewpoint as the one that has the biggest weight over any other. I mean, I understand why this happens, but don't agree with it.

And that without going with the fact the English is considered the international language of choice for communication, so there's a lot of English speakers here from countries that English is not the first language.

Edited by luisedgarf on Oct 19th 2022 at 3:46:12 AM

On the one hand, if we were to try to make the point that this site is only about tropes, people would be well within their rights to point out all the exceptions to that rule. On the other hand, those exceptions are ones that people fought for despite breaking our rules at the time, citing other exceptions as justification. This is a recursive argument that ultimately leads to us having no content standards whatsoever.

So the line has to be drawn at some point, and all one needs to do is look through the loads and loads of Projects threads to find a lot of tropers dedicated to reining in all that excessive content.

When evaluating one of these questions, neither "it's off-mission so we don't want it" nor "we have lots of off-mission stuff already, so why worry" is a persuasive argument. Rather, we need to look at how the content affects the primary function of the wiki: conveying information about the tropes used in a work.

In this context it becomes obvious that long description sections and lists of voice actors detract from the core experience of reading the trope examples. It's the same basic thing as when people want to add vital statistics and gameplay notes to characters. We don't need to know that the third Stormtrooper from the left is 5'11", was born on Corellia, and has an O+ blood type, and we don't need every Pokémon's stat block and moveset.

Stat blocks and VA lists and that sort of thing are actively hostile to the function of the articles.

The other question to be asked is, "Can people get this information in a useful format somewhere else?" If yes, then our content is redundant. There's nowhere else (that we care about) to get trope lists for works and characters, but there are plenty of places to get their voice actors, their vital stats, and their movesets.

TV Tropes does not want or need to become a one-stop shop for every piece of information about a work. Most works where anyone cares enough to document this stuff will have their own wikis, and of course there are IMDB, Wikipedia, and many other repositories of factual, trivia, and technical data about works.

We are not obligated to list all of the VAs for localized works because indexing the works of every creator is not our purpose. It's more of a convenience. "Discovering" and supporting VAs is an ancillary function that can be done just as easily through other sites.

On the language thing, TV Tropes is an English-language wiki because we were founded in the U.S. and English is the language that all the staff and moderators speak. We require that all articles be written in English first and use English titles (where available) because we cannot moderate non-English content.

If people want to throw around accusations of being American-centric, that's their right I guess, but it's also our right to tell them to STFU because it's our site and we make the rules. You can make Spanish TV Tropes if you want (although you probably can't call it that for trademark reasons), or you can contribute to our Translations project and try to beef up the non-English side of the site.

We have been looking into adding more software support for translations, and if we ever make that happen (sigh) we'd be interested in recruiting multi-lingual moderators, so that's a great thing to look forward to in the future if you are interested. (Well, we have a few multi-lingual moderators already but they don't make it their job to work on the translations.)

So, here's my word on the subject. A Characters subpage may list the original actor for each character, whether live-action or voiced, for the language that the work was produced in. If the work is dubbed in English, the English VA may be listed as well. Subtitled works don't need additional entries.

If the article is translated into another language, then the same rules apply for the language in question — the Spanish VA can be listed on a Spanish translation of the article, etc.

In other words, if you want to list the Hindi VA, you need to make a Hindi translation of the article. Put in the actual effort.

Edited by Fighteer on Oct 19th 2022 at 10:02:13 AM

Agreed with Fighteer on the issue of site scope. Reminds me of this old comment by Heavy Metal Hermit Crab that goes into detail about some of the problems with doing that as well. From the comment:

Edited by themayorofsimpleton on Oct 19th 2022 at 9:16:02 AM

So this went off-topic, again. Huh.

I want to note something: pretty sure the only one that is interested in the voice actors for dubs made in Ukraine, Bulgaria, Romania, Turkey and the like is the one troper that added it. A lot of these languages dont have their respective thread on the translations forums, or they do have it, but have been dead for years (like the arab or esperanto languages).

So, I think that at least the languages that no one on this site speaks could be deleted outright.

I should add that if we ever do get the 2.0 concept working, it would be feasible to add voice actors (along with the language(s) they voice) as data relationships to characters objects, so it's something we could support in the future — the far, hypothetical future. It's doing it all within the confines of wiki text that becomes a distraction.

Edit: And yes, if it's just a few tropers adding the majority of the bloat, we can stop it by stopping them.

Edited by Fighteer on Oct 19th 2022 at 11:08:47 AM

The most effective way to do that, though, is to invite them to this discussion so that they can share their opinions and learn our reasoning.

Once we've established a policy, they can be informed of that, but if you (general "you", applies to anyone reading) know who is adding them, they should be brought into the discussion now.

Edited by crazysamaritan on Oct 19th 2022 at 11:41:17 AM

So who are these people? Let's page them in.

Well the ATT that started this all was about the Characters.Scissor Seven page and stated it was due to luisedgarf, who has been participating in the discussion here (they were also the subject of this ATT report).

Another page with a prominent example is Characters.Miraculous Ladybug Marinette Dupain Cheng, but that was already there when the page was split and that show's character sheet is a tangled mess, so I'm not sure who added it.

Looking at the other reports it seems that a few cases are just slow aggregation as a troper comes by and adds on one by one.

Edited by laserviking42 on Oct 19th 2022 at 12:06:56 PM

So this is probably a case of people seeing that others have done it so they do it as well. In other words, there's not a lot of motivation behind the practice, so cutting it out shouldn't meet that much resistance.

I mean, I myself wont oppose to it. Do I feel that this decission is America-centric? Yes, I have to admit that I do (and I also have to admit that that is what I have felt of the entire site from time to time), but all I can do is just adapt and move on.

I don't see a solution either, other than having people do the work of translating all of the tropes and articles. The core principle of any wiki is that things only happen if people do them.

OK, so we cut without mercy nor hesitation those voice actors from dubs that no one speaks (which I support)

But what about more used languages like french, spanish or japanese? We use the note or we also cut them?

We list the actors of the translation that was originally released. If the page is in a different language, we list the actors of that dub as well (this is usually English, but the French version of the page would have French actors, the German version German actors, and so on). All others are cut.

Edited by badtothebaritone on Oct 19th 2022 at 2:46:55 PM

We cut them in the English-language article. If there is a Spanish-translated article for the work, then the Spanish voice actor would be listed instead of the English one. If the work is live-action, the original physical actor is listed in every article.

English

• John Dumbass (voiced by Alex Actor)

Spanish

• John Dumbass (expresado por Carlos Carlitos)

I guessed at that Spanish translation since I'm very rusty. Apologies for any inaccuracy.

Edited by Fighteer on Oct 19th 2022 at 4:16:17 AM

I've just sent a PM to Doctor Rayman for their thoughts on this, since they added French VAs to some of the character articles (including the MCU, etc.).

Edited by gjjones on Oct 19th 2022 at 4:18:37 AM

Yeah, a bit of mistakes here and there but Carlos Carlitos make me laugh.

Then, I have another question: what about pages with a lot of voice actors? The easiest example is Street Fighter: Ryu. The list just counts japanese and english ones. Is there a way to trimmer it?

I find it slightly amusing that anyone cares about the VAs for fighting game characters since they're mostly just grunting and shouting. I guess some of the games have story modes, so the best I can do is shrug. The underlying cause of the issue is that the article combines so many different products, but if Capcom doesn't care about continuity of VA talent, then I don't see why we should either.

Edited by Fighteer on Oct 19th 2022 at 4:18:58 AM

I think there's a point where if its a character page for a character that's cross media a lot you just don't need to list the V As?

Like, does the Batman page need to list everyone who has ever played Batman in every tv show, video game, commercial spot, movie, etc... ever?

Ryu's in the same boat where he's not only a street fighter character, but appears in other franchises (Power Rangers video games and other crossovers), has had multiple animes, has had multiple movies. There's a point where one has to go "Why would you list everyone who's played Ryu in everything he's been in". There's the Street Fighter wiki for anyone who wants that. Or IMDB.

Edited by Ghilz on Oct 19th 2022 at 1:25:34 AM

(Quite sensibly, Batman (The Character) does not do that. Sorry, I had to check.)

No, but yeah, the 'source material' character sheet doesn't have to list everyone who's ever played them. If Ryu appears in Anime 1 and Movie 2, his portrayers can be listed on the work pages (or respective character sheets, if they exist) of Anime 1 and Movie 2, not Street Fighter: Ryu.

In that case, we should only leave his official Japanese voice actor, Hiroki Takahashi, and no one else, not even his English voice actor, as he is the voice actor from which all the foreign dubs, English included, are based from, only changed it when he is replaced with another voice actor.

On the other hand, I do agree with Synchrocity's idea of putting respective voice actors in specific character pages rather than lumping them all of them in a single page.

Edited by luisedgarf on Oct 19th 2022 at 3:43:14 AM

That also makes sense — if there is an official VA for the source material, we can list it, but no others. I don't keep up with this stuff.

Edited by Fighteer on Oct 19th 2022 at 4:41:38 AM

Fair I should've emphasized it didn't do that and I wanted to emphasize it's a good thing it doesn't.

And yeah, that's fine. If there's an official primary protrayer you can list that. Heck if we're feeling generous you can list past official actors, though i'd list them by years ideally rather than by list of works or appearances like the Ryu page does coz that just becomes long.

Edited by Ghilz on Oct 19th 2022 at 1:43:24 AM

Of course, there are times when characters have their voice actors listed differently. For example, on Characters.Lupin III, the titular character's folder reads something like this:

Voiced by: Yasuo Yamada (1971-1994), Kanichi Kurita (1995-present), Nachi Nozawa & Taichirou Hirokawa (1969 Pilot Film), Toshio Furukawa (The Fuma Conspiracy), Keiichi Nanba (Lupin III D2 Manga)

Thoughts?