Multiple Languages and International Distribution Questions

[chilker]

I'm still quite new here and hope this is the right section in the forum to ask this.

 

I have read somewhere that we should not generally put tags in foreign languages on our images. However, as many of my images were taken in Japan and I have some ability to speak and write the language, I'm curious if it's worth adding Japanese tags. I thought it might help when I still have room to add tags to images taken in Japan of distinctly Japanese things (cherry blossom viewing, certain temples and shrines, cultural festivals, etc). Some locations and festivals have unexpected kanji/characters in their names, and using machine translation when putting the photos (and accompanying tags) into Japanese distributors' databases would result in incorrect translations and inadequate or completely false tagging.

 

Does anyone know how do distribution services work? I looked through this page (https://www.alamy.com/contactus/local-distributors.asp) and found some of the Japanese image distributors and looked through their databases and didn't find any of my own photos of Japanese scenes in there. Do they only pick and choose a few images from Alamy and redistribute those? Or are they supposed to be offering all of Alamy's photos with machine-translated tags? I'm just curious how it all works and if it's worth adding Japanese tags.

 

I appreciate any insight you can offer.

 

Thanks!

[spacecadet]

All I can add is that I've had sales to Japan, so presumably the distros do their own translation.

[chilker]

Thanks for the response! I'm glad to know the system is working. I'm just trying to understand more about how it works and the best way to make sure that my pictures are properly tagged in Japanese (since I expect many of the potential customers for my images will be Japanese).

[Phil Robinson]

The Image Manager seems to have problems with basic European diacritic marks like accents, so I doubt it would cope with the Japanese alphabet.

 

[chilker]

Thanks for that! Good to know about the trouble with diacritic marks. I have added Japanese language tags to a few items just to see if they work, and they seem to be ok. (You can search "ニホンザル"  (Japanese for "Japanese macaque") and my pictures show up. So I think it functions. I just don't know how useful it'll be or how it'll be dealt with if or when the images are sent to international distributors.

 

Thanks everyone for the thoughts!

[DDoug]

Translation software isn't guaranteed to know the local common names for plants and animals, so it doesn't hurt to add them. As for the diacritic marks, I tend to use several variations: Düsseldorf, Dusseldorf, Duesseldorf. When Germans drop the umlaut, they add an 'e'.

[spacecadet]

6 hours ago, DDoug said:

Translation software isn't guaranteed to know the local common names for plants and animals, so it doesn't hurt to add them. As for the diacritic marks, I tend to use several variations: Düsseldorf, Dusseldorf, Duesseldorf. When Germans drop the umlaut, they add an 'e'.

Search ignores diacritics so I only put them in captions, out of courtesy to the language. But I try to remember to add the "e"s.

Edit: I evidently don't try very hard. I have 212 images of Köln but only 28 with koeln in the tags. How popular a search do you think it would be?

[DDoug]

4 hours ago, spacecadet said:

Search ignores diacritics so I only put them in captions, out of courtesy to the language. But I try to remember to add the "e"s.

Edit: I evidently don't try very hard. I have 212 images of Köln but only 28 with koeln in the tags. How popular a search do you think it would be? 

Looking at All of Alamy, results say 28,216 for Koeln and 27,644 for Koln. The likelihood that someone searching a German location would him- or herself be German is fairly high, so I think it's worth including. Similarly the variant spellings: Hannover/Hanover, Braunschweig/Brunswick, etc.

[chilker]

Good to know all of this! Thanks for the helpful information about search and what characters are ignored.