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That's why I prefer the other option (Ling Bai), because now her family name is in the same field as everyone else's. Unfortunately it means her common name goes against her culture, although "credited as" would fix that on individual profiles.
Which would you consider more important? Cultural accuracy or database consistency?

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Quoting TheFly:

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If the fields were renamed "Given Name" and "Family Name" (as I voted) then would it not be possible to have a tickbox somewhere to flag that the names should be inverted when displayed? Then we could have database consistency AND cultural accuracy of displayed names.

I put a feature request in for that very thing quite a while ago, but nothing came for it. I guess if we get the field names changed first, then push for the checkbox. 

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...then again, not sure if an Asian's preference would be to have the family name entered into the given name field or not...

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Quoting ya_shin:

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Furthermore he said, that there are no middle names in Chinese, making both the second and third Chinese character of his name his given name; probably using a dash under the circumstances provided (he said something along the lines, that using our three fields the middle name field would stay empty.

I can agree with that as a general rule, although there are a few exceptions where the first and second characters are the family name, in particular in some other Asian countries like Vietnam (but I think these exceptions can be taken care of by adding a dash between the 1st and 2nd characters).


Quoting northbloke:

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Using Chow Yun-Fat as an example, at the moment the way the votes stand is for his common name to be Yun-Fat//Chow and use "credited as" for all the Chow Yun-Fat films.
Another example Ling//Bai as a common name, using "credited as" for the Bai Ling credits.

With Achim, I have tried some time ago to find a common approach to the problem you raise, but have lost interest since too many people who don't have a clue of what this is all about, and who don't even have a single Chinese movie in their collection, found it necessary to pollute the thread and impose their view.

So I just keep my collection private and parse the names the way it suits me best. For what it's worth, this is how I do it:

1. Parsing:

Last Name=Family Name
First Name="2nd and 3rd Chinese characters" as Achim put it 
Middle Name= Western First Name, if any, in case the First Name field is already taken by a Chinese First Name.

2. Select the option "Last, First Middle" for Actor Name Format in "Tools -> Options..."

So Chow Yun-Fat will show in DVDProfiler as "Chow, Yun-Fat" and Gordon Liu Chia Hui will show as "Liu, Chia Hui Gordon". Of course, Tom Cruise will then show as "Cruise, Tom", but I still know who he is. 

Jim

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North:

All I did was outline my basic procedures, which quite personally I think is the best approach. This is being donevery sparingly by at the moment and will prbably be awhile longer before I shift gears and focus on it. I will only say, that based on what i am seeing supplied by most users as documentation for any Common Name usage, let alone Oriental, is THIN at best. They seem to be operating on the assumption that similar names are the same person and are therefore only using the look-up tool. The common names I am presently even allowing anywhere near my databases are the ones that are demonstrating to me that they have satisfied themselves that they are more than similar names.

In the case of Oriental names, I doubt the lookup tool will be of much help at all, I reserve my ultimate judgment for a later time, but we may ultimately have to depend on users like xradman to help all of us here, and it would be my sincere hope that he and others will document his conclusions for all of our benefit and not base the conclusion on something vague.

I have a very strict set of Rules which I apply to myself, north. This doesn't mean i don't make occasional typos or skip a name.   But if I have to document something, I leave room for very little doubt, I have confidence in my work and I want you to have the same level of confidence. You won';t ever have to PM me and say...what because you say so?   I also never go into research mode with a pre-conceived notion of what the answer is and evaluate the data based on that notion, which I have seen MANY users do, I go where the data takes me. I see a lot of ummm  I can only call nationalistic or cultural offense taken over things. You will never, ever see that from me, I don't care whether it is H/B/C or H//BC nor do I care what culture says, I do care what the data tells me and if I can verify H//BC (strcitly an example) then I am a happy camper, if I can't then I am a happy camper, WHATEVER the data tells me is good. I don't know if you were here for the whole HBC debate, but what it finally came down to was we found a 1994 credit for HB-C, a 1995 credit for HBC and a 1997 for HB-C. You might ask why that is important, because taken on its own merit the 1995 MIGHT indicate that the actor had moved the 2nd name to the middle spot (it happens), the flanking credits indicated that while possible, that was not the case.

Rambling I know and covering a lot of ground. I hope this was useful for you.

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