What if you have a credit like "Original Musical Arrangements By"
Would you map the credit to Music composer as the as the credit would be correct for "Used for the composer of the film's Original Score" as per the rules and the description of the role?
In the rules, it is seem to be a bit more clear that in that case you would map it to the "the composer of the film's Original Score" as per the note. The rules specifically gives a guideline on the crew members job description.
Or since "Original Musical Arrangements By" is not listed as a valid role, would you not submit the credit at all?
What if it was a original arrangement of existing songs written by other persons versus completely new material? Would that make a difference?
The only application statement of how to use the table is this one sentence--->
"If someone is
not credited with one of these roles (or direct translations of these roles),
do not include them in the Crew section"
The phrase "direct translations of these roles" implies some type of mapping will have to occur whether it be for a foreign language translation or an old term versus a modern one, etc etc. And as from the discussion and the voting, it appears that many people may read this rule differently.
This gets very tricky for older and older foreign films and silent films especially since many of the modern crew roles were not well established. (Many silents have no crew credits which brings up another debate completely)
One of the reasons I normally do not submit crew profiles or input data for some unique disks that I have is because some of the rules are unclear. For instance I have a very large number of R2 Japanese DVDs that I would never think about adding due to the horrible mess of dealing with Kanji to English translations of names let alone trying to make sure that I mapped crew roles properly. As discussed extensively in the forums before, this program is not very Asian language friendly. But I digress.
(Fact for fun: Ray Harryhausen is credited with the words for Special Effects in Japanese and not Technical Effects ??: ??·??????? so when going from the English phrase Technical Effects it gets mapped to the word tokusetsu which means Special Effects as well as means a specific genre and type of movies and tv shows.)
There are quite a few "rules lawyers" around here who seems to jump on folks whenever they vote opposite to they way they think or understand that things should be. (and yes I am doing it a bit now too) All this does is often cause a hostile environment.
My main point is that no matter how hard the rules try to be specific and clear, there will always be some room for interpretation. The reason I started this thread for was some discussion on how to best read this rule and get some discussion on how to handle these type of situations.
To me it really all boils down to how to read just this one phrase: "(or direct translations of these roles)"
I am not asking for the rule to change as I think there should be some latitude for common sense in the case of crew title role variants and I think the wording allows for that. What I am asking for is to discuss what are the boundaries that people see for reading this rule.
For instance Skip has been pretty clear in stating abbreviations and very very minor word variations are ok but in the case of the submission in question Technical Effects is a unique role/wording and credited as such so it should not be mapped.
Where I differed in opinion is that I believe that Technical Effects = VFX/SFX and that it should be mapped to modern day/common terminology used in our database (and is done in foreign languages, IMBD, other online crew databases etc etc)
I have some bias toward viewing the crew as specific job roles as that is how we would have to handle this when dealing with a foreign language. (maybe because there is too much Japanese in my brain
) And I think that for the most part that is what we are doing: mapping the crew listings to the few small listing types in the database. The problem is how to handle these hand full of tough cases.